Love, Respect, and Being Centered Upon: Loewald’s Image of Development in Childhood and the Consulting Room

ABSTRACT

This contribution begins from two Loewaldian formulations: one, the patient becomes a centered unit by being centered upon by the analyst, and two, analytic neutrality and the analytic attitude begin from love and respect for the individual and individual development. Loewald elaborates these aspects of the analytic attitude, as he emphasizes affective as well as semantic uses of language and an attunement to the patient’s particular developmental place and possibility for understanding. Loewald’s developmental view of change in analysis ties him to Erikson and points the analyst to age and the life cycle. I describe some of the goals and challenges of working with older patients and bring in Settlage’s writings on adult development and analysis in old age.

KEYWORDS:

• Loewald
• analytic attitude
• development
• the life cycle
• aging
• the maternal
• Erikson
• Settlage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This distinction came up recently (October 2017) in a question from an Italian feminist psychoanalyst and Loewaldian at a presentation I was giving in Italy: What about patricide, and how is this term not exclusive? In Italian, it turned out, there was no non-gender-specific term.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy J. Chodorow

Nancy J. Chodorow, PhD is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; a Lecturer on Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School; and Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. Chodorow’s books include The Reproduction of Mothering (1978); Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989); Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (2004); The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999); and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012). Chodorow has written extensively on Loewald and the Loewaldian tradition, and, in 2004, she suggested that Loewald, along with Erik Erikson, can be seen to have founded an American Independent tradition in psychoanalysis, which she describes as intersubjective ego psychology. Dr. Chodorow is the winner of numerous awards and recognitions. She is in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.