“Ev'ry Timke We Say Goodbye, I Die a Little …”: Commentary on Holly Levenkron's “Love (and Hate) With the Proper Stranger”

Abstract

In agreement with Levenkron, I offer a postclassical psychoanalytic view of the analyst's self-revelation as part of a process that leads to the coconstruction of an intersubjective reality that incorporates the experience of each partner. When patient and analyst can each access and openly share the dissociated thoughts and feelings that are “too dangerous” to their relationship to be thought then the externalization of the patient's relationship with his own internal objects becomes available to intersubjective negotiation, self-reflection, and conflict resolution. How much self-revelation is “enough” and how much is “too much” can't be known in advance, and it is the ongoing and often painful effort to struggle with its unpredictability that defines what Levenkron calls “affective honesty,” not the analyst's subjective assessment of the “truthfulness” of the personal experience she or he is considering revealing.