Lauren Levine | New York University (original) (raw)
Papers by Lauren Levine
Psychoanalytic dialogues, Mar 3, 2024
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2021
Pediatrics, 1985
Mother-infant interactions of adolescent and nonadolescent mothers are compared, and the impact o... more Mother-infant interactions of adolescent and nonadolescent mothers are compared, and the impact of maternal age, ego development, education, and child care support on these interactions is examined. Thirty primiparous, white, lower- to middle-class mothers (half less than or equal to 17 years) and their healthy full-term infants (8 months) were studied. Interactions were videotaped during face-to-face interactions and teaching sessions. Child care support and ego development were assessed. During face-to-face interactions, only one difference was found between adolescent and nonadolescent mothers: nonadolescent mothers showed more positive affect toward infants. During teaching, nonadolescent mothers talked more, showed more positive affect toward infants, and demonstrated tasks more often. Individual differences during face-to-face interactions were more related to mothers' ego development and support whereas teaching interactions were mostly associated with maternal age. Thus, maternal age was a stronger predictor of interactive style during teaching. This may partially explain noted cognitive deficits in infants of teenage mothers. However, individual differences among all mothers in ego development, education, and support were significantly related to interactions. Thus, teenage mothers with less education and support and lower ego development may represent a higher risk subgroup of adolescent mothers providing less optimal care-giving environments for their infants.
Infant Behavior and Development, 1984
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2022
Paper, discussions, and replies: each has its own cast of characters. Among the theorists, clinic... more Paper, discussions, and replies: each has its own cast of characters. Among the theorists, clinicians, researchers, patients, family members, and friends whose ideas and narratives fill our pages, there is often tremendous diversity of life experience and points of view. Readers tend to consider one paper at a time, encountering the fullness in a text as it is voiced by the actors in each scene. We pay attention to individuals’ multiplicity which necessitates navigating difference as well as areas of identification and resonance. But if we frame the journal issue as a whole to be a symphony of subjectivities, new challenges arise as broad areas of resonance and friction come forward. In any given issue, complexity emerges from a range of theoretical positions and clinical styles, stories that chart developmental hurdles and interpersonal sorrows, and an array of material challenges. There are astonishing moments of transformation and growth. Memories may be recounted from a distant perch or drenched in affect. Some vignettes bolster an author’s perspective; others frame an interaction from multiple points of view. Reflections upon these encounters depict rival psychoanalytic sensibilities. When grouped all together, this cacophony of ideas, reveries, and life experiences comprises the dramatis personae of psychoanalysis. The more lives we open our pages to, the more differences we feature. The greater the cast of characters, the more generative the controversies that animate our Psychoanalytic Dialogues. We welcome the breadth and depth of the ensemble of speakers, authors and interlocutors, analysts, and patients. We are aware that in assembling a diversity of perspectives and subject positions, we court controversy and collisions. With polyphony comes vulnerability. Our task is to hold in mind that the patients who are described, the theorists who are contested, the authors who offer their ideas for discussion and debate are real people whose moment in the spotlight can be pleasurable and proud as well as it may be precarious and fraught. Among our reviewers and editors and, indeed, among we four joint editors, orchestrating a complicated score requires nimble attention to stray notes. A premise of ethical portraiture and collegial conversation follows in our collaboration with authors and discussants. So is our determination not to shy away from difficult conversations that portray how hardearned if near impossible (and indeed undesirable) it is to elicit consensus from a symphony of subjectivities. If relationality is best fostered with an ear to complexity and contradiction, equanimity is the measure of skillful composition such as you will encounter in this issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 32:2. Lauren Levine argues powerfully for a radical shift in our conception of the analytic frame through clinical encounters as a White analyst working with three women of color. Rather than waiting for patients to bring up issues of race, Levine believes it behooves White analysts to take the lead in listening for and speaking directly about race and racism, and to struggle with our inclination toward silence, complicity, and dissociation. Drawing on PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 2, 97–98 https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2022.2033545
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, May 4, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Jan 2, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Sep 3, 2022
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Nov 2, 2021
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, May 4, 2021
Psychoanalytic Dialogues has, since its inception, welcomed controversy. Articles were paired wit... more Psychoanalytic Dialogues has, since its inception, welcomed controversy. Articles were paired with discussions so as to proffer challenges to the relational paradigm and, at the same time, forge a relational “tradition.” By presenting papers in this innovative manner, the journal’s editors oriented our study with a ruthless, spontaneous gesture that challenges us to keep interrogating, deepening and expanding our analytic theories and their clinical and sociocultural relevance among our international community of readers and writers. Thirty years along, this framework inspires us to contextualize our tradition of scholarship in an ever-evolving matrix of texts, clinical discourses and social practices. Paradoxically, whilst the relational tradition was cohering, our editorial strategy cleared a path for its deconstruction. The editors were keen to affirm the insights of psychoanalysispast yet launch a tradition of critique that might upend and reframe everything psychoanalysis, regardless of orientation, had taken for granted. If at times it may have seemed that the founders’ texts were off-limits or that discussants were primed to shore up the relational heft of centerpiece articles, the momentum was already in place for controversy and innovation to hold sway. The “journal of relational perspectives” now proudly includes among its contributors, peer reviewers and editorial teammates, colleagues whose convictions punt well beyond the poles that supported relational psychoanalysis’s originary “big tent.” What Dialogues most hopes to avoid in featuring discussions can be summed up in the language of recent critical race theory as “assimilation.” It is not our ambition to center a master discourse, nor to rehearse and reinvest our own image in the texts we publish. Controversy is a tool to resist ideological conformity. By embedding articles in the context of discussions, the ultimate aim of our editorial practice is to promote a discourse that rues assimilation without erasing our footprint. Just as we lend coherence to ideas and clinical practice by bringing them into print, we seek to push boundaries and create generative transitions within the traditions that vest us with insight. To that end, we invite discussants who, we imagine, will nudge our collective practice ever forward with commentaries that both immerse us in authors’ texts and challenge us collectively to take lessons learned to the next level. It is important to explain, here, that while original papers are submitted to the journal and are subject to blind peer review, we editors-in-chief pair articles with discussants in a curatorial manner. Our strategies are various. Sometimes, we engage kindred authors who might elaborate a theoretical concept or creatively illustrate its clinical implications and significance. Other times, we wish to highlight some transformational opportunity in a text by inviting a discussant who we imagine will heed that call and meet it with a challenge. We are committed to intersectionality and interdisciplinarity as a means of contextualizing the dialogue that our outreach to discussants is able to spark. In this issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 31:3, our discussants are bold and spry—which honors our authors while challenging them. In turn, our authors offer thoughtful replies to the discussants that illustrate their personal humility as well as their generous investment in the transformational power of dialogue. PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 251–252 https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2021.1902739
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Jan 2, 2021
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Nov 2, 2022
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2021
Likely you’ve noticed that Dialogues has a new look. Beginning with our last issue, the journal a... more Likely you’ve noticed that Dialogues has a new look. Beginning with our last issue, the journal adopted a new graphic layout and proof style. The pages look different in print, not quite as much online. In the words of our publisher, the change was made to accommodate “the way search engines navigate content and as a way to make the most of the technological improvements in the proofing process.” We were persuaded to adopt the new style for reasons that seem pertinent to our overall mission. Change will do us good. Holding on to the way things have always been is an enactment that this journal cannot afford to abide. Indeed, it’s time for a fresh look at the confines and limits of psychoanalysis. These days, many more readers access Dialogues online than in print. Last year, Dialogues logged 52,000 online readers and 47,000 downloads. If psychoanalysis is to offer its words to a broader, more diverse audience, and to readers who do not and, perhaps, cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in print, enhanced online search afforded by this format is a necessary tool to foster change and growth. An eco-conscious reader among us will add that the planet will be all the happier for it. With that in mind, we are proud to present a suite of papers and discussions that, each in their own way, takes a fresh look at psychoanalysis, threading a path between continuity and change. Katie Gentile’s highly original article highlights an approach that our editorial group is excited to advance. Deftly integrating contemporary theories of posthumanism and Indigenous Studies, interwoven with a moving clinical vignette, Gentile challenges us to rethink the boundaries of the human and nonhuman, prompting us to examine assumptions about race, the environment, the ordering of time and place in relations of tensegrity, and what counts as care when we frame clinical objectives. In her discussion, Patricia Clough bolsters the bridge Gentile builds between psychoanalysis and the new materialism, affect theory and media studies to frame a “technoecologically affective” and decolonial manner of parsing psychoanalytic process. “A Few Regrets” is a powerful stand-alone paper in which Joyce Slochower, a central figure in relational psychoanalysis, looks back on the evolution of her thought. In this candid and self-reflective piece, Slochower moves beyond her recent focus on relational excess to a reappraisal of her contributions on holding in relational psychoanalysis. She describes the dialectic of her theoretical development and her shifting relationship to her ideas and ideals, sharing “A Few Regrets” along the way. In this generous paper, Slochower demonstrates the value in self-examination and intersubjective dialogue and advocates for a lessening of cross-theoretical critique within the psychoanalytic conversation. Danielle Novack’s paper exemplifies the Dialogues tradition of rich clinical discourse. Novack offers a novel take on the use of the multidisciplinary team in the treatment of eating disorders, proposing an expanded self-state model through which a broad range of dissociated self-other representations can be engaged and linked. She illustrates how conceptualizing the team as a “multiperson” field can contribute to therapeutic action in novel and generative ways. The paper is discussed from two vantage points. Tom Wooldridge, applying his ideas about alexithymia and the role of the analyst in promoting the psychic elaboration of meaning, hones in on PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 2, 133–134 https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2021.1889333
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Nov 2, 2021
Psychoanalytic dialogues, Mar 3, 2024
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2021
Pediatrics, 1985
Mother-infant interactions of adolescent and nonadolescent mothers are compared, and the impact o... more Mother-infant interactions of adolescent and nonadolescent mothers are compared, and the impact of maternal age, ego development, education, and child care support on these interactions is examined. Thirty primiparous, white, lower- to middle-class mothers (half less than or equal to 17 years) and their healthy full-term infants (8 months) were studied. Interactions were videotaped during face-to-face interactions and teaching sessions. Child care support and ego development were assessed. During face-to-face interactions, only one difference was found between adolescent and nonadolescent mothers: nonadolescent mothers showed more positive affect toward infants. During teaching, nonadolescent mothers talked more, showed more positive affect toward infants, and demonstrated tasks more often. Individual differences during face-to-face interactions were more related to mothers' ego development and support whereas teaching interactions were mostly associated with maternal age. Thus, maternal age was a stronger predictor of interactive style during teaching. This may partially explain noted cognitive deficits in infants of teenage mothers. However, individual differences among all mothers in ego development, education, and support were significantly related to interactions. Thus, teenage mothers with less education and support and lower ego development may represent a higher risk subgroup of adolescent mothers providing less optimal care-giving environments for their infants.
Infant Behavior and Development, 1984
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2022
Paper, discussions, and replies: each has its own cast of characters. Among the theorists, clinic... more Paper, discussions, and replies: each has its own cast of characters. Among the theorists, clinicians, researchers, patients, family members, and friends whose ideas and narratives fill our pages, there is often tremendous diversity of life experience and points of view. Readers tend to consider one paper at a time, encountering the fullness in a text as it is voiced by the actors in each scene. We pay attention to individuals’ multiplicity which necessitates navigating difference as well as areas of identification and resonance. But if we frame the journal issue as a whole to be a symphony of subjectivities, new challenges arise as broad areas of resonance and friction come forward. In any given issue, complexity emerges from a range of theoretical positions and clinical styles, stories that chart developmental hurdles and interpersonal sorrows, and an array of material challenges. There are astonishing moments of transformation and growth. Memories may be recounted from a distant perch or drenched in affect. Some vignettes bolster an author’s perspective; others frame an interaction from multiple points of view. Reflections upon these encounters depict rival psychoanalytic sensibilities. When grouped all together, this cacophony of ideas, reveries, and life experiences comprises the dramatis personae of psychoanalysis. The more lives we open our pages to, the more differences we feature. The greater the cast of characters, the more generative the controversies that animate our Psychoanalytic Dialogues. We welcome the breadth and depth of the ensemble of speakers, authors and interlocutors, analysts, and patients. We are aware that in assembling a diversity of perspectives and subject positions, we court controversy and collisions. With polyphony comes vulnerability. Our task is to hold in mind that the patients who are described, the theorists who are contested, the authors who offer their ideas for discussion and debate are real people whose moment in the spotlight can be pleasurable and proud as well as it may be precarious and fraught. Among our reviewers and editors and, indeed, among we four joint editors, orchestrating a complicated score requires nimble attention to stray notes. A premise of ethical portraiture and collegial conversation follows in our collaboration with authors and discussants. So is our determination not to shy away from difficult conversations that portray how hardearned if near impossible (and indeed undesirable) it is to elicit consensus from a symphony of subjectivities. If relationality is best fostered with an ear to complexity and contradiction, equanimity is the measure of skillful composition such as you will encounter in this issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 32:2. Lauren Levine argues powerfully for a radical shift in our conception of the analytic frame through clinical encounters as a White analyst working with three women of color. Rather than waiting for patients to bring up issues of race, Levine believes it behooves White analysts to take the lead in listening for and speaking directly about race and racism, and to struggle with our inclination toward silence, complicity, and dissociation. Drawing on PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 2, 97–98 https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2022.2033545
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, May 4, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Jan 2, 2023
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Sep 3, 2022
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Nov 2, 2021
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, May 4, 2021
Psychoanalytic Dialogues has, since its inception, welcomed controversy. Articles were paired wit... more Psychoanalytic Dialogues has, since its inception, welcomed controversy. Articles were paired with discussions so as to proffer challenges to the relational paradigm and, at the same time, forge a relational “tradition.” By presenting papers in this innovative manner, the journal’s editors oriented our study with a ruthless, spontaneous gesture that challenges us to keep interrogating, deepening and expanding our analytic theories and their clinical and sociocultural relevance among our international community of readers and writers. Thirty years along, this framework inspires us to contextualize our tradition of scholarship in an ever-evolving matrix of texts, clinical discourses and social practices. Paradoxically, whilst the relational tradition was cohering, our editorial strategy cleared a path for its deconstruction. The editors were keen to affirm the insights of psychoanalysispast yet launch a tradition of critique that might upend and reframe everything psychoanalysis, regardless of orientation, had taken for granted. If at times it may have seemed that the founders’ texts were off-limits or that discussants were primed to shore up the relational heft of centerpiece articles, the momentum was already in place for controversy and innovation to hold sway. The “journal of relational perspectives” now proudly includes among its contributors, peer reviewers and editorial teammates, colleagues whose convictions punt well beyond the poles that supported relational psychoanalysis’s originary “big tent.” What Dialogues most hopes to avoid in featuring discussions can be summed up in the language of recent critical race theory as “assimilation.” It is not our ambition to center a master discourse, nor to rehearse and reinvest our own image in the texts we publish. Controversy is a tool to resist ideological conformity. By embedding articles in the context of discussions, the ultimate aim of our editorial practice is to promote a discourse that rues assimilation without erasing our footprint. Just as we lend coherence to ideas and clinical practice by bringing them into print, we seek to push boundaries and create generative transitions within the traditions that vest us with insight. To that end, we invite discussants who, we imagine, will nudge our collective practice ever forward with commentaries that both immerse us in authors’ texts and challenge us collectively to take lessons learned to the next level. It is important to explain, here, that while original papers are submitted to the journal and are subject to blind peer review, we editors-in-chief pair articles with discussants in a curatorial manner. Our strategies are various. Sometimes, we engage kindred authors who might elaborate a theoretical concept or creatively illustrate its clinical implications and significance. Other times, we wish to highlight some transformational opportunity in a text by inviting a discussant who we imagine will heed that call and meet it with a challenge. We are committed to intersectionality and interdisciplinarity as a means of contextualizing the dialogue that our outreach to discussants is able to spark. In this issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 31:3, our discussants are bold and spry—which honors our authors while challenging them. In turn, our authors offer thoughtful replies to the discussants that illustrate their personal humility as well as their generous investment in the transformational power of dialogue. PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 251–252 https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2021.1902739
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Jan 2, 2021
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Nov 2, 2022
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2021
Likely you’ve noticed that Dialogues has a new look. Beginning with our last issue, the journal a... more Likely you’ve noticed that Dialogues has a new look. Beginning with our last issue, the journal adopted a new graphic layout and proof style. The pages look different in print, not quite as much online. In the words of our publisher, the change was made to accommodate “the way search engines navigate content and as a way to make the most of the technological improvements in the proofing process.” We were persuaded to adopt the new style for reasons that seem pertinent to our overall mission. Change will do us good. Holding on to the way things have always been is an enactment that this journal cannot afford to abide. Indeed, it’s time for a fresh look at the confines and limits of psychoanalysis. These days, many more readers access Dialogues online than in print. Last year, Dialogues logged 52,000 online readers and 47,000 downloads. If psychoanalysis is to offer its words to a broader, more diverse audience, and to readers who do not and, perhaps, cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in print, enhanced online search afforded by this format is a necessary tool to foster change and growth. An eco-conscious reader among us will add that the planet will be all the happier for it. With that in mind, we are proud to present a suite of papers and discussions that, each in their own way, takes a fresh look at psychoanalysis, threading a path between continuity and change. Katie Gentile’s highly original article highlights an approach that our editorial group is excited to advance. Deftly integrating contemporary theories of posthumanism and Indigenous Studies, interwoven with a moving clinical vignette, Gentile challenges us to rethink the boundaries of the human and nonhuman, prompting us to examine assumptions about race, the environment, the ordering of time and place in relations of tensegrity, and what counts as care when we frame clinical objectives. In her discussion, Patricia Clough bolsters the bridge Gentile builds between psychoanalysis and the new materialism, affect theory and media studies to frame a “technoecologically affective” and decolonial manner of parsing psychoanalytic process. “A Few Regrets” is a powerful stand-alone paper in which Joyce Slochower, a central figure in relational psychoanalysis, looks back on the evolution of her thought. In this candid and self-reflective piece, Slochower moves beyond her recent focus on relational excess to a reappraisal of her contributions on holding in relational psychoanalysis. She describes the dialectic of her theoretical development and her shifting relationship to her ideas and ideals, sharing “A Few Regrets” along the way. In this generous paper, Slochower demonstrates the value in self-examination and intersubjective dialogue and advocates for a lessening of cross-theoretical critique within the psychoanalytic conversation. Danielle Novack’s paper exemplifies the Dialogues tradition of rich clinical discourse. Novack offers a novel take on the use of the multidisciplinary team in the treatment of eating disorders, proposing an expanded self-state model through which a broad range of dissociated self-other representations can be engaged and linked. She illustrates how conceptualizing the team as a “multiperson” field can contribute to therapeutic action in novel and generative ways. The paper is discussed from two vantage points. Tom Wooldridge, applying his ideas about alexithymia and the role of the analyst in promoting the psychic elaboration of meaning, hones in on PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 2, 133–134 https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2021.1889333
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Nov 2, 2021