The Possible Profession: Joe Lichtenberg and the Restoration of the Bodily Self

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ABSTRACT Beginning with “The Psychoanalytic Situation and Infancy,” I consider Joe Lichtenberg’s legacy of creating an experience-near holistic psychology of the self in terms of a larger attempt to make psychoanalysis a more possible profession. By grounding developmental theory in an empirical-phenomenological science of subjectivity, Lichtenberg not only helped give self psychology a more “clinically relevant baby” (Stern) – he also widened the scope of analytic theory to include both the non-dynamic unconscious and the bodily subject, which Freud had abandoned in his search for a purely psychological science of subjectivity. In this sense, “The Psychoanalytic Situation and Infancy” represents the first major installment in Lichtenberg’s decades-long project toward what we might call, the restoration of the bodily self. Furthermore, by freeing psychoanalysis from its pathomorphic developmental theory – which construed adult psychopathology in disembodied terms, as evidence of the fragmented, conflicted nature of infant experience – Lichtenberg helped catalyze an “enactive” turn in psychoanalysis, opening the way for re-conceptualizing mental pathology in adaptive terms as “varieties of self-disorder” (Sass) – ensuring psychoanalysis’ relevance to the understanding and treatment of conditions long considered outside of its purview.