North Star Conversations Transcript: From “One-Person Psychology” to a Therapeutic Partnership—Alan Levy, PhD

Brandon Gimbel (00:00)

Could you talk a little more about the therapeutic dyad, because that's not always stressed as an important, or as a critical piece of treatment?

Alan Levy (00:07)

That's a good point. Actually, analysis started off as a one-person psychology, where the patient was blind to their own motivations, and the all-knowing analyst who was sitting behind the patient was able to see objectively, analytically, what's going on. Fortunately, that changed over the years. And so what we've moved to is a two-person psychology. In the dyad, sometimes the patient sees something before the analyst. It's not that they don't know. It's just that we know differently, and that becomes really a time when you can be creative in thinking and wondering. It really is a partnership rather than one acting on another. In this day and age, there's a lot less time for reflection, for thinking, to actually spend some time with someone, to really think about the texture of one's own experience and how that fits in with their hopes, with their dreads. Why aren't they feeling truly alive right now? And to do that, you need another person who helps facilitate that. We say that the relationship is mutual but asymmetrical. We figure things out together, for the patient's sake.