A Last Interview with Lewis Aron (Introduction)

Abstract

Steven Kuchuck and Bárbara Ortúzar introduce the transcription of Ortuzar’s interview with Lewis Aron at the 2018 Annual IARPP Conference in New York City, Aron’s last before his untimely death eight months later.

Keywords:

• Bárbara Ortúzar
• dissociation
• Lewis Aron
• psychoanalysis
• relational psychoanalysis
• repression
• self-critique
• Stephen Mitchell
• Steven Kuchuck

On February 28, 2019, psychoanalysis lost one of its most knowledgeable and fervent teachers and representatives. As huge a loss as this was to the larger psychoanalytic community, it hit relational psychoanalysis particularly hard. Lewis Aron—Lew to most of us—had been a close colleague and dear friend of the late Stephen Mitchell. As is widely known in general, and certainly by readers of this journal, Mitchell, along with Jay Greenberg, was the first to identify the concept of relational psychoanalysis as an umbrella term that organized the various schools of thought within psychoanalysis that focused on a person’s embeddedness in the social context rather than the isolated individual (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). After Mitchell began using the term ”relational” to also refer to a newly developing perspective, Aron joined him and the other first-generation relational thinkers in developing and propagating what came to be known as the relational revolution (Mitchell, 1988/2009).

In addition to being an original architect of relational psychoanalysis, Lew was also the founding president of IARPP, the director of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis for over 20 years, and a prolific writer and editor. When all is said and done, however, he will likely be most endearingly remembered as a tremendously beloved teacher. Lew taught hundreds of colleagues in his highly sought-after study and reading groups and was widely known to be extremely generous and responsive to his students, to new professionals, to his peers, and to all of the many colleagues who sought his counsel. He had a famously encyclopedic knowledge about all things psychoanalytic and was full of theoretical and political wisdom. In fact, Bárbara and her colleagues who joined her for this interview had already experienced many of these qualities when they met with Lew at the 2010 IARPP conference in New York City and extended an invitation for him to come to Chile in November 2012 to give several lectures and a live supervision. The lectures were as compelling and dynamic as they always were when Lew took the stage. During his stay, and in keeping with his generosity of spirit and the sheer pleasure he took in thinking about analytic work with new friends and colleagues, he made himself available for numerous roundtables and other more casual events that arose during that memorable 2012 visit.

Lew certainly left his mark on Chilean Relational Psychoanalysis. When Bárbara reached out to Lew some five years after his visit to inquire about an interview, it was no surprise that she heard back speedily and enthusiastically in the affirmative. He suggested that they take advantage of the fact that she would be traveling from Santiago to New York City for the IARPP conference. And so, in June 2018, along with Chilean colleagues Gonzalo Acuña, Gianni Cánepa, Paola Davanzo, Pilar Mardones, and Edgardo Thumala, Bárbara sat down to speak with Lew. With Steve Kuchuck’s subsequent involvement in formulating certain theoretical and biographical questions to help contextualize the transcribed dialogue, a lively discussion follows this introduction.

The Chilean group met with Lew during a fortuitous time in his work, right after the release of two books (2018a, b) that Lew conceived of, co-edited, and contributed to. These books brought together a group of relational psychoanalysts to engage in an unprecedented critique of their own theory (Aron, Grand, & Slochower, 2018a, b). As it turned out, these would not only be Lew’s last books, but also the last conference that he would be able to attend, and what follows is, to the best of our knowledge, the last interview he could grant. As we are confident you will hear in his remarks below, he was as full of life in this conversation as ever, even though Lew’s long battle with cancer came to an end just eight months after the interview that follows.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Kuchuck

Bárbara Ortúzar, Psy, is a Clinical Psychologist, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Relational psychotherapist and founding member of the Chilean Chapter of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), supervisor accredited by the College of Psychologists and the Chilean Society of Clinical Psychology, and accredited specialist in individual adult, adolescent, couples and parent psychotherapy. She has extensive teaching experience in different institutions, study groups, tutorial programs and postgraduate university courses. She is coauthor and co-editor of the “Introductory Dictionary of Relational and Intersubjective Psychoanalysis.”

Dr. Steven Kuchuck, DSW is former Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, where he currently serves as Senior Consulting Editor, Co-Editor; Routledge Relational Perspectives Book Series, Immediate Past President of IARPP, faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NIP National Training Program, and other institutes. His book, The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, was nominated for a Gradiva Award for best psychoanalytic book of 2021. He won the Gradiva Awards for best book of 2015, Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience and 2016, The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (co-edited with Adrienne Harris). The Workbooks of Masud Khan: Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst (co-edited with Linda Hopkins) is being published by Karnac Books in September 2022.