The “Flame” in Dialogue and Dialectics
Leon Wurmser , M.D.
It is in a spirit of very deep gratitude and friendship that I would like to make a contribution to this volume in celebration of Joe Lichtenberg.
I met Joe almost 50 years ago when I came with my family directly from Europe to the Sheppard-Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, MD. Joe was at that time, I believe, acting Director of Training. In 1964, on the fi rst Scientifi c Day there, he was discussant of a paper I had written with a colleague. This paper addressed chronic severe depersonalization and the close relationship between this clinically important state and shame. I do not remember Joe’s remarks except that he rightly used the metaphor of the three blind men describing the elephant, each from his particular per- spective. In my youthful brashness, I was not amused by being viewed as giving just one idiosyncratic perspective, but I am sure now that Joe was right.
A few years later, after having started my psychoanalytic training at the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute, Joe was assigned to me as an individual tutor in ego psychology, because my training analyst gave the introductory course. This was a special privilege that gave me a lasting foundation in a fi eld I had already been much interested in long before coming to America.
I felt Joe was not only very thorough and erudite, but full of respect for my own thinking and background and open to a free and critical discourse, rather different from what I was exposed to elsewhere in my training. This still took place in Baltimore. Not long after that, he moved to Bethesda and changed society and institute.
It was, I believe, about 1973, that I was invited to join Joe’s seminar on creativity and psychoanalysis when it was studying Eugene O’Neill, among
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other authors. I gave an early, not-very-well-thought-through presentation about Ibsen, and I soon realized that the demands of the presentation were to be more exigent, the level much higher, than I had been used to. Certainly at the latest in 1975, I became a regular member of the group when we started a three-year study of Henry James’ major works and biography by Leon Edel. Being a member of this seminar on creativity and psychoanalysis proved to be one of the most important, most formative experiences of my entire professional life and career. It opened a nearly uninterrupted dialogue about the great works of world literature where we were not anymore just three blind men groping for different aspects of leading creative oeuvres and their authors, but a developing, slowly expanding group of women and men trying both seriously and yet also with much fun to plumb the depths of creativity.
I do not want to enumerate all the creators and books that we covered and continue to study (and also some non-verbal forms of creativity). I think it became an invaluable and tremendous source of enrichment for all the participants who typically came from far away to join together on four Saturday afternoons a year. This work had two poles: on one side there were the creative works, the creative minds of the authors, the interweaving of life and work, and the psychoanalytic study of the interaction between childhood, development, society, and culture. The other pole, however, was the integrative mind of Joe who in an admirable way after each presenta- tion succeeded in pulling the main threads together, posing incisive ques- tions, typically opening up new dimensions of the topic, and thus starting a wide-ranging and very free discussion where Plato’s metaphor, “after much needed discourse … and a life lived together, suddenly a light … is kindled in one soul by a fl ame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself” (Seventh Letter, p. 341). That fl ame was, for Plato and Joe, a spirit of free inquiry, and spirit much nourished by the minds moving dialectically between opposites.
One guiding principle for Joe, echoed in his recent study of Cervantes’
Don Quixote , is to focus on the aesthetic transformation of the creative act rather than its relationship to any specifi c psychoanalytic theory or pathological formation (Lichtenberg, 2010 ). This meant a strong guidance by the phenomena, a liberation from all clichés that would confi ne under- standing, a consistent reopening of questions and avoidance of prema- ture closure, and a profound shaking of dogma. This spirit of free inquiry proved, of course, heuristically of immense value in Joe’s synthesis of the insights from early development with fresh clinical experience and trad- itional theory.
For me, this “fl ame” in dialogue and dialectics is fueled by respected dif- ferences in psychoanalytic understanding. I was and am much more focused
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on the many layers of inner and outer confl ict and Joe, who was always utterly generous and gracious in accepting what I had to say, was focused more on the experiential context.
Reference
Lichtenberg , J. ( 2010 ). Cervantes and Don Quixote . Psychoanalytic Inquiry , 30 : 267 – 275 .