– On Maturity. Nashville Therapy

Loewald was writing at a time when analysts of all persuasions took for granted that the analyst’s analysis made him or her more rational and mature, developmentally more advanced than patients. In this respect, I think that this criticism of Loewald and his contemporaries is well founded….

Yes, Loewald regards the analyst as more mature than the patient, but what does he mean, exactly, by “maturity”? Maturity for Loewald is not the customary advanced position along a linear developmental scale; for him, maturity is the capacity to navigate among and bridge different developmental and organizational levels. Consider this passage from Loewald’s (1949) earliest psychoanalytic paper, which presages so much that was to follow.

“It is not merely a question of survival of former stages of ego-reality integration, but that people shift considerably, from day to day, at different periods in their lives, in different moods and situations, from one such level to other levels. In fact, it would seem that the more alive people are (though not necessarily more stable), the broader their range of ego-reality levels is. Perhaps the so-called fully developed, mature ego is not one that has become fixated at the presumably highest or latest stage of development, having left the others behind it, but is an ego that integrates its reality in such a way that the earlier and deeper levels of ego-reality integration rémain alive às dynamic sources of higher organization [p. 20].”

Loewald (1977b) thus portrays the analyst not as solidly, consistently parental, but as straddling levels of organization.  “The difference between the patient and the analyst is that the former is at the mercy of that primitive level (inundated by it or disavowing it), whereas the analyst is aware of but not given over to it” (p. 379).

Relationality- from Attachment to Intersubjectivity. Pg. 50.