Joseph Lichtenberg: A Doer Doing

“Come on in, have a look around,” says Joe Lichtenberg as he answers the door to his home in Bethesda, Maryland. “There’s much to look at!”

He’s not wrong. The entryway splits off into two staircases, one leading up to a landing, and the other, shorter, running off into sunken drawing and dining rooms, and the kitchen. So the guest is immediately placed at three levels—hall at ground, landing above, living space below—and flanked at all three by museum-worthy photographic prints. They are large, black and white, and matted on white to seem even larger, gathered as closely together as wall space and good taste will allow. Many of the photographs are stunningly rendered land- or seascapes; a few feature people and events. Each is clearly by a prominent artist; each captures light and texture with a breathtaking clarity that calls out for closer study. The invitation for the guest to wander is immediate.

One photo in particular catches my eye as I follow Dr. Lichtenberg down the stairs to his living room: an 8 x 10 gelatin silver print by Sally Mann, titled “At My Mother’s House.” The photo shows a living room darkened—or dimmed, rather—by sheer white curtains that give the afternoon light filtering through them a granular, almost mote-like quality. The light seems to bathe the subject of the photograph: a child on the edge of puberty standing on a stool, between two sculptures, in front of an out-of-focus, older figure. The child is naked, seeming to flicker upward from the stool in an undulation of pale, untainted, perfect flesh. Her (his?) pose is classical yet unforced, and the entire composition is heart-stopping in its beauty and illicit erotic charge. I know enough about Sally Mann to assume that it’s probably one of her own children in the photo.

The photos arrayed on the table nearest Dr. Lichtenberg’s easy chair attract a different kind of attention, despite the massive image of a chain running down a ship’s icy hull that looms over them on the adjoining wall. They represent a far more conventional kind of portraiture: family photos gathered from various decades of his life—photos of children and grandchildren smiling for the camera. Joe Lichtenberg is ninety-four years old. He has used his time to live, treat patients, build a family and an intellectual community, collect art, and write. His intellectual focus has been on expanding the theory of the self as promulgated by Heinz Kohut into a concept of motivational systems—and his approach has often centered on trying to shift emphasis away from pathology and instead toward shoring up what goes right in development and, more specifically, toward the ways human beings adapt their energies to grow, forge connections, and generate meaning. Enlivening the Self, his 2016 book written with his long-time—and long-suffering, he jokes—collaborators, Frank Lachmann and James Fosshage, reinforces this effort: “For humans,” the authors write, “feeling enlivened resides psychologically in a sense of self. An enlivened sense of self emerges from the lived experience of being a doer doing” (p. xv).

Lichtenberg embodies this tenet—and clearly seems like someone who has used the practice of psychoanalysis, as well as his writing and collecting, to generate a sense of aliveness and agency. His delight in his art collection is evident, as he encourages me to rotate a sculpture, or points out his Lucian Freud. He shows a similar collector’s zeal for generating ideas and publishing them—the shelf above his TV holds dozens of books he has written or contributed to. For him writing has always been what one does, a requirement for being a psychoanalyst, and he has found that he simply wants to put down to paper things he thinks are interesting. “I wake up in the morning, I run or swim, and then I review the previous day’s patients, and then the patients I’m going to see today, and in there are things that my mind tugs at—and then it’s just a matter of finding the time during the day of putting it down, the formalistic part of writing.”

Enlivening the Self offers the idea that experiencing oneself as an enlivened being involves using our toys, our bodies, and our attachment figures as arenas for action. Even the possibility of action, or the observation of others acting, serves to activate the mind on various levels toward the intentionality and joyousness that provide the motor for life. These levels include not just verbal and imagistic symbolization, but also the subsymbolic system—“emotion as a nonconscious physiological experience, procedural memory, primary process, intuition, ‘listening with the third ear’ (Reik 1948), signal anxiety, nonconscious emotional communication (telepathy), and motor actions that have been regarded as reflexive . . . the hum of living in one’s body” (p. 46). The viewpoint of the book is that the subsymbolic system is the least appreciated in traditional psychoanalysis, even as it focuses on harnessing the wandering mind for action. When Lichtenberg and his co-authors state that free association is in fact a task-focused activity—due to the instruction of the analyst—and thus perhaps antithetical to a truly wandering mind, one can appreciate the complicated position they have encamped in, at varying distances from the principles of classical analysis, self psychology, and relational psychology. The orientation of readers toward these branches of thought will dictate their experience of Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage’s work.

Lichtenberg has written in previous books about the shortcomings in his classical training and his sense that he wasn’t given the correct tools to truly understand and validate his training cases. Here this is typified by the example of Mrs. H (referenced in both Enlivening the Self and Narrative and Meaning), where Lichtenberg describes, retrospectively, how the “constraining strictures placed on his responsiveness” by “a training institute that emphasized neutrality, abstinence, and anonymity, and oedipal conflict” led to an enactment that hindered the treatment (p. 5). Lichtenberg felt impeded as an analyst by his training not affording him the license to be more nurturing toward his patient’s intense needs, many of which stemmed from conflicts in the patient’s preoedipal (rather than oedipal) development. Within this framing context, someone given to narrative leaps might view the first and longest chapter of Enlivening the Self as an act of reparation—Lichtenberg marshals research at hand to understand how neonates and infants exert themselves as agentic selves, research that might have helped him understand and help his patient better had he learned about it as a trainee.

Mrs. H presented as a phobic woman whose early treatment with Lichtenberg was marked by tense silences (one lasted for seven consecutive sessions), an inability to free associate, an accompanying guilt over her inhibition, and struggles for domination. If she saw Lichtenberg outside the office, she would look straight at him but later utterly deny having seen him. On the couch, she would sometimes compulsively open her mouth, as if yawning but without sucking air in, and then be unable to close it. In Enlivening the Self, Lichtenberg interrogates his stance at the time of Mrs. H’s treatment, noting—for example—how he viewed her silences as defensive, and how this stance retarded his ability to help his patient. If he were to do it again, he tells us, he would view Mrs. H’s silences as an expression of a particular intention and goal, such as protecting herself from shame, antagonizing him when she was angry, or allowing herself respite to recharge. These intentions, goals, and actions could then have been traced back past the oedipal drama, through to the earliest stages of infancy.

In his contemplative redo of the case, Lichtenberg states that a more affirmative approach would have enabled him to consider Mrs. H’s infancy as a determinant for the clinical puzzles she presented. Mrs. H was a twin, and even though she initially described herself as being superior, it turned out that her sister had bested her during their first few weeks of life by feeding faster and more easily. The more finicky Mrs. H was fed less preferentially, or fobbed off to an older sibling to be given a bottle. Lichtenberg uses this retrospective insight to understand Mrs. H’s strange mouth-opening symptom, and how, in their dynamic, she was a helpless baby, and he the inept provider. Similarly, a dream Mrs. H has, of a man suddenly rising up in the middle of a room, helps explain her disavowal of their encounters outside the consulting room. Seeing her analyst “in the flesh” would stir erotic feelings within Mrs. H, which would quickly sour to humiliation due to her lived experience of her twin being “the attractive one.” She would then push away the humiliation and, with it, the image of the upright Lichtenberg that had evoked it. Lichtenberg concludes that had he been able to see Mrs. H’s silences and avoidances as actions performed to protect herself—rather than as onerous defenses, which he had been taught to view almost pejoratively—he would have been able to adopt a useful analytic stance, instead of playing out scenes of deprivation that only confirmed Mrs. H’s view of herself as helpless and defeated.

As an antithesis to this image of Mrs. H. as a helpless, unfed baby, Enlivening the Self focuses on the neonate as a doer doing, a being with agency working to modulate and integrate its experience with its emerging self. The drives for attachment and affiliation mean that the baby is not focused solely on its primary caregiver, but is instead spreading its forming senses to the whole spectrum of people, pets, and toys in its life, “all mapped, sought and missed.” The authors assert further that by five to eight months infants have narrative capacities, as evidenced by their ability to have emotional responses to anthropomorphic blocks and their perceptions of whether these blocks are helpers or hinderers (the research quoted to support this view is by Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007, 2010; Hamlin et al. 2011). When faced with fear and helplessness, children may become controlling as a behavioral strategy to cope, all the while experiencing both their caregivers and themselves as simultaneously “frightening and unpredictable or frightened and helpless” (Solomon, George, and DeJong 1995, quoted on p. 44). With this idea in mind, Lichtenberg reframes Mrs. H’s struggles for domination as echoing the infant self’s attempts to maintain order when it becomes disrupted toward a tipping point. One of the ways cohesion can be retained is by using categorization, symbolization, and prediction to organize the multiplicity of lived experience, which could be taken as a mission statement for much of Lichtenberg’s work. ¹

Lichtenberg’s reformulation of the experience of helplessness as a form of agency is reminiscent of Kohut’s experience with his troublesome patient Ms. F, Mrs. H’s chronological and alphabetical predecessor. Kohut realized that his interpretations were impeding Ms. F, who tended to respond to them with rage; what he needed to do instead, he surmised, was to mirror the patient’s experience and provide an environment in which she could feel seen and appreciated. His “feeding” would allow the patient to develop what had been unable to grow in the absence of such nourishment in childhood. When we spoke, Lichtenberg described to me how he had been asked to review Kohut’s Analysis of the Self, and how he had proclaimed it an instant classic. Kohut’s book provided an approach to the patient’s narcissism and defenses that affirmed them as adaptive techniques rather than noisome mental structures to be overcome. This allowed for a theoretical framework that pointed a way out from the deficiencies Lichtenberg had detected in the classical model of ego psychology.

Lichtenberg expands on Kohut’s ideas by developing a concept of motivational systems, which he views as his major contribution to the field. Motivational systems—defined as “organized dynamic groupings of affects, intentions, and goals”—seek to categorize the ways individuals approach the world. There were originally five motivational systems—physiological regulation, attachment, exploration/assertion, aversion, and sensual/sexual. Lichtenberg later incorporated feedback from colleagues and added two more motivational systems: affiliation/group-forming and caregiving. (Lichtenberg explained to me that he had initially felt that these were later offshoots of the drive toward attachment, but more recent infant research has convinced him that these systems do, in fact, emerge during the earliest stages of life.) The purpose of the motivational systems model is to describe the developmental states through which a patient might move, and thus allow a therapist to understand how the patient is striving to meet her needs.

It may be unclear how this categorization helps, and to those practicing outside of self psychology it might seem redundant to describe what many analysts feel they do instinctively. But a motivational systems approach might lead an analyst to take a distinctive stance toward a patient’s report. Many Freudian ego psychologists may find that they mistrust the patient’s stated aims; looking for the hidden, unconscious motives underneath, they might leave the patient feeling unheard or misunderstood. In contrast, a motivational systems approach allows the analyst to accept the patient’s agenda, at least provisionally. The attempt to further understand this agenda puts the analyst in a position the patient may feel is closer to the patient’s lived experience. Whereas some Freudians hear a yes in every denial, Lichtenberg accepts the “no” and asks patients to clarify what they feel he has missed. Where many analysts hear the patient’s statements about them as projections and transferences from past figures onto the analytic tabula rasa, Lichtenberg encourages “wearing the attribution,” looking within for evidence that the patient’s attributions—even their accusations—are correct. He is confident that the patient will prove correct in some way, and that discovering how will enrich one’s understanding of the countertransference—and of what the patient has done to elicit it. This attitude, effectively bridging self psychology with relational approaches, allows for the patient’s experience to be honored and validated. The affective attunement thus generated allows for shifts and expansion in the shared perspective of patient and analyst.

Lichtenberg and his co-authors provide a diagram of the mind envisioned in this way in the afterword of Enlivening the Self. ² It is a drawing of a tree, with some liberties taken with verisimilitude—the tree’s root splits into five, while seven thick branches crowd their way out from the trunk—that recall textbook illustrations of the motor neuron. This is somewhat fitting, given the authors’ emphasis on motivation, intentionality, doing. The bulbous area between the trunk and the seven branches—thickened, perhaps, by the necessity of having to lead into seven branches, but also recalling the widened shape of the nucleus-containing cell body of the motor neuron—is labeled SELF. The five roots are labeled to show the foundational inputs that feed into the self: perception, cognition, affect, memory, and recursive awareness. The trunk allows traffic of information in both directions, so that what is sensed and processed in the external and internal worlds can be used to modulate the activity of the motivational systems that form the seven branches of the tree. Concurrently, the motivational systems, the branches, can relay back news of their success or failure in carrying out their respective intentions down the trunk and back to the roots, so that it can be incorporated into knowledge. Affect and metaphor ³ are the emissaries of this information, traveling up and down the trunk. Up above, the seven branches send feelers out into an abbreviated, stippled canopy. Five of the branches are solid and spoke-like: physiological regulation, exploratory/assertive, attachment, caregiving, affiliative. A sixth branch, with the broadest base—meaning that it has to curve out most to reach the canopy—has an internal divider that almost bisects it: the upper segment is sensual, the lower, sexual. (In our conversation, Lichtenberg emphasizes to me that there are many pleasures that are sensual but not sexual, with various cultures setting up that distinction—across the divide of shame—differently). The last branch is labeled aversive before it too gets internally divided (but not split off), into withdrawal and antagonism. The word “aggressive” is not used.

Lichtenberg and his collaborators recognize that their stratification of the psyche into motivational systems risks becoming stiff and overintellectual, and they offer the caveats that motivational systems act within the matrix of intersubjectivity ⁴ and that, like fractals, the different motivational systems have open boundaries, allowing for seamless shifts between them. ⁵ In the opening chapter of Narrative and Meaning, Lichtenberg emphasizes that “as it is lived, experience is not fragmented into separate functional systems but is organized, synthesized, and given holistic expression through narratives that are created using many forms of symbolization” (p. 2). So narrative becomes important not merely as a way of symbolizing experience and deepening meaning through metaphoric linkage, but also as a way of combining the fluid interplay of different motivational systems. Here narrative is given its broadest possible meaning: not just stories made of words, but all multisensory and subsymbolic portrayals of experience. Narrative can move from richly metaphoric to linear and concrete, and where a particular narrative falls on this spectrum in relation to the situation determines its degree of adaptiveness. Narrative and Meaning attempts to flesh out how approaching a patient’s inner narrative can further a treatment. The narrative could be a baby grasping at the breast, or a single curse-word telling the story of the patient’s relation to sexuality or bodily functions. Narrative is not only a core feature of the clinical exchange, but also a foundation of the mind itself. Verbal representation captures only a fraction of the richness of human experience, and Lichtenberg wants to use his broader formulation of “narrative” to capture the full breadth of what occurs within the human mind, in particular to understand how the mind synthesizes the inputs entering it. Moreover, since narratives are constantly being revised, with memories being rewritten rather than existing as static entities, the transference becomes dynamic rather than just a projection. So the patient’s interaction with the analyst not only permits working through, but also allows new facets of the past and of its cast of characters to emerge, and for views of them to shift and change. A narrative is an open system, one that both creates and modifies the self.

Infants have a narrative from the beginning, in Lichtenberg’s conception, albeit not one with words, but one that is spoken through their actions, and as these actions are received and mirrored, infants develop repetitive narratives with which they can organize their experience. This view of early life flows naturally into the mirroring of self psychology: seeing the child’s actions as a sequence of a doer doing allows an observer to perceive narrative coherence. “The repeated experience of being an initiator whose feelings, intentions and goals are recognized, correctly identified, and facilitated creates an inner sense of an effective self—a center of initiative,” enabling children to slip into “their identities, their personhood” (p. 18). Lichtenberg’s redefinition of narrative points toward how he sees his role as analyst. He describes Freud’s position as that of an archaeologist, digging for truth, and his own as someone looking for a story or stories that in Donald Spence’s words (1982) have “an aesthetic finality” (p. 31). ⁶ Since the veridical truth is not discernible and may not even matter, it is narrative truth—the ability to make sense of an event and give it meaning—that is paramount, even when there are contradictory narratives. Lichtenberg returns to the example of Mrs. H, whose narrative of superiority to her twin overlay one of being the underdog, to show how contradictory narratives emerged in and out of treatment—not only through the telling, but also through “associations, interactions, enactments, and symptomatic acts” (p. 20). As a witness to these currents of meaning, he explains, the analyst should be not an historian, but rather a “poet, artist, and aestheticist” (p. 21).

Lichtenberg and his collaborators revel in their love of stories (as told by patients, as well as in literature and art) in Narrative and Meaning, a passion so clearly evident on the walls of Lichtenberg’s home. The contributors spin out into their favored territories in various chapters. Lachmann waxes lyrical on his love of music; Fosshage attempts to elucidate the stories in dreams; and Linda Gunsberg recounts the ghost stories encoded into her work with adoptees. Those who view narrative in a more conventional sense provide the most clinically helpful contributions. For example, Daniel Goldin provides a close-up of how he and a patient created a nuanced story told in their own mutually invented idiom, while allowing enough room for questioning what might be lost if the imposition of meaning were too enthusiastic, while Richard Tuch and J. Mark Thompson use their experience with marital therapy to explore how the personal narratives of conflicting partners become confused with veridical truth, and how these divides can be bridged through shared stories.

Given how expansively “narrative” is defined in Narrative and Meaning, easy linkages could be made to Freud’s Sophoclean inspirations of incest and murder, or Melanie Klein’s inference of fantasies of omnipotence, cannibalism, and annihilation within the preverbal infant. These are the ur-narratives of psychoanalysis, the first cave paintings in the therapist’s attempts to comprehend the development of the mind. Even Sally Mann’s prepubescent Venus does not spring out of the photo without the contextualizing gaze of the grandmother. But here Freud is but a flicker, Klein omitted. This may have to do in part with Lichtenberg’s stated aim of moving away from the blood and guts of the primal narratives to a more loving, affirmative model (Winnicott thus gets more play here, even as he stood on Klein’s shoulders). In Psychoanalysis and Motivational Systems (Lictenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage 2011), eros and thanatos are joined by far more benign forces, and thus deemphasized. Lichtenberg often returns to the model scene of the infant feeding, and being in tune with the mother, but there is less focus on the hate and aggression that both Klein and Winnicott saw there. These older, crueler narratives are replaced by a story of how the infant gains agency.

The emphasis on the young child manipulating the available environment to meet its needs may spring also from Lichtenberg’s personal history. He mentions to me that he was the only child of parents who separated when he was nine months old, but focuses on how this led to a situation where he was raised in a house with his mother, grandmother, and aunt, while seeing his father every day. When he was older, Lichtenberg met a man who wanted to help train him athletically, despite the fact that as a young intellectual he saw no such potential in himself. Lichtenberg spent summers at this mentor’s beach home, interacting with him and his household staff. So he was raised and nurtured by a host of people from different backgrounds, and it is hard not to infer that he re-creates this as he writes. Many of his books are group endeavors, and this seems to flow from the way he is: someone who gathers people together. He has founded his own institute for psychoanalysis; started and maintained a psychoanalytic publication, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, with Mel Bornstein; and holds a quarterly seminar on creativity at his home, amid his gallery of wonders. That the seminar is now in its thirtieth year is testament to Lichtenberg’s ability to create passionate and sustaining communities like the one that nurtured him as a child. I’m reminded of a line from Narrative and Meaning that identifies creativity as a means for transforming one’s personal narrative into “a work of art that is an aesthetic (metaphoric) variant of issues that deeply preoccupy” (pp. 52–53).

Sitting with Dr. Lichtenberg made me curious to know more about how his training became a roadblock to his development. Reading Freud’s Introductory Lectures in college (along with the plays of Eugene O’Neill) made Lichtenberg want to be an analyst, and his first analysis—with a female candidate—was a nurturing and powerful experience. But his training analysis with Hans Loewald was unhelpful (see Gunsberg and Hershberg 2016, pp. 22–23), leaving him feeling radically misunderstood. Meanwhile, at his institute, the strictures of the classical viewpoint were suffocating. He took a break from training before returning to finish, and approached his third analysis as a requirement to be completed so that he could get on with his career. Certificate in hand, he proceeded with his own self-analysis. This is a story similar to that of his collaborator Mel Bornstein, who, after going through two analyses that failed to provide what he needed, embarked on a thirty-year self-analysis, an hour a day on an exercise cycle, and concluded that what had been missing was the ability of classical ego psychology to grasp his wholeness and personhood. There is a sense with both Bornstein and Lichtenberg that they were failed by their analyses and by the status quo of American psychoanalytic thinking; but rather than be deterred, they channeled their love for the field, and for helping people, into creating their own solutions. In Lichtenberg’s case, this was by inventing a system that he believed would allow the patient to feel the validation and enlivenment his own analyses failed to provide. Both Bornstein and Lichtenberg chose creation over disillusionment, and tried to find the theory to enshrine and explain their acts of personal heroism. ⁷

In my mind, it still can’t have been easy to build an analytic identity from a place of finding one’s own analysis and training unhelpful. For Lichtenberg, the framework of motivational systems served to undo some of the disappointment. Narrative and Meaning underscores some of the techniques an analyst can use to create a more nurturing environment. For example, the analyst might work to establish a frame of friendliness and safety, lead with empathy, and instead of listening to narrative for unconscious intent and primary process, focus attention on the conscious message in its fullest possible detail. This attentiveness allows deeper unconscious meanings to emerge on their own, with the delivered message starting to allow for more and more personal material.

But as I sit with Dr. Lichtenberg, it’s abundantly clear that he is just as attuned to the unconscious as any other kind of analyst, and I wonder if his theoretical focus on “the message is the message” dissipates some of his vivacity and clinical instincts. I ask if choosing to focus on the patient’s intentions through the lens of motivational systems stays too close to what is conscious, choosing mirroring over exposing deeper drives. He responds that the unconscious is always working, and cannot be obviated. He gives his own example: in his first analysis, with the female analytic candidate, he found that she gave him plenty of space to talk, to examine his feelings, to discuss his identifications with literary characters such as the brothers Karamazov. He felt that he had an open and attentive audience, and the freedom to do the inner work he needed to do. In short, the analysis was going well. But at some point, Lichtenberg stopped dreaming and couldn’t figure out why. The situation continued for some time, until he finally had a dream. His analyst’s interpretation included a reference to menstruation, and suddenly he found himself shaking his finger in the air, emphatically stating, “No! No menstruation!!!” Quietly, his analyst said, “Yes, I’m not menstruating, I’m pregnant.” He had somehow picked up on her pregnancy and responded to it on a nonverbal, unconscious plane.

To be clear, Lichtenberg has written about the unconscious in other books, but in Narrative and Meaning it is somewhat sidelined in focusing on the task at hand. The danger of course is that it may be missed altogether, a possibility Lichtenberg dismisses as a misunderstanding of his position. Still, Narrative and Meaning culminates in a mysterious passage that is hard to understand in terms other than of primary process, a provocative fragment that goes unexplained by a typically systematic writer. Near the end of our interview, I want to call this passage to his attention. His first analyst has come up due partly to my curiosity about this passage, but after an hour of conversation I’m still not sure how to summon up the courage to ask my question. I ask to take his copy of Narrative and Meaning off the shelf, and carefully go through the brief chapter I have in mind, but can’t find what I’m looking for. I’m left to ask a watered-down version of the question I would have been empowered to ask had I had the requisite evidence: Did he find that in writing about narrative and meaning, his own life narrative started getting activated and encoded into the work? “I’m sure it did,” he replies, without further elaboration.

Later, after a frustratingly long drive back to New York, I get home and go straight to my reviewer’s copy of Narrative and Meaning. In seconds I find the passage in the same chapter I’d turned to in his office:

In conjunction with identity, centrality of a sense of self refers to originating and initiating, that is, to agency. I (my sense of self) am the center from which emerge my desires, intentions, goals, and ideals. A sense of self hopefully is experienced as a central core from which motivation (being a doer-doing) and an event emanate (always in conjunction with the intersubjective and physical context). In apathy, depressive paralysis of intention, panic, and inhibition, the sense of self is experienced as without force, direction, and/or stability. An example of a temporary loss of a sense of centrality of agency occurred to me as I began to recognize the failure of my hopes and expectations of my second analysis. I had regarded my first analysis as very helpful and my relationship with my analyst as positive and affectionate. We were preparing to stop because of her advanced pregnancy and the institute’s requirement that I switch to a training analyst. The planned ending period was suddenly interrupted by her tragic death from a rare complication of pregnancy. I experienced my training analyst as treating many feelings and attitudes I held dear as defensive and my building negative feelings toward him as my distortions. As the ambience between us, at least on my side, became increasingly negative, I dreamt that I was metamorphosing into a crab lying on its back. The Kafkaesque imagistic narrative remained with me for days as I pictured the crab struggling to right itself. I realized my dream story was my message to myself to get off a couch on which I had come to feel an increasing loss of being a center of initiative and agency. I took the risk of ending or at least interrupting my goal of analysis and analytic training believing I had to do so to regain a sense of self-cohesion and vitalization, that is, to restore my story of my identity as a person of worth and initiative [pp. 226–227].

The stunning revelation of his first analyst’s death, emerging mere pages before the book’s end, is almost mystical. I find myself transfixed by the sudden glimpse of a secret story that seems to emerge forcefully and then be warded off. It has been shown to me, but I have not been given permission to approach it. Lichtenberg would probably warn me not to jump to extrapolating on the unconscious without sufficient data, but having not elicited more information in the chance I had, I’m left to ponder the words themselves. The restating of an affirming theory of a doer-doing—nothing new there—and the narrative of needing to get away from a constricting analysis and training resonate with the motivational systems model articulated in Enlivening the Self and Narrative and Meaning. But right in the middle of the passage, like an undetonated landmine, like Mrs. H’s dream of a man suddenly rising up in the middle of the room, flashes the fact of his first analyst’s death by pregnancy. My own training comes up against Lichtenberg’s stance and grinds to a halt—for me, this is a story crying to be interpreted. I try to regain my footing, but the words don’t allow me any purchase. The passage stands as is, and within it, the revelation glints flickeringly—forbidden, erotic, threatening—a moment caught in time—probably sixty years ago now!—a moment now gone.