Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28:94–101, 2018

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 online
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2018.1411736

Pina Bausch and the Interweaving of Trauma, Memory, and

Creative Transformation: Commentary on Papers by Sarah
Mendelsohn and Deborah Dowd

Lauren Levine, Ph.D.

Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center

In her “dance-theater” (Tanztheater), Pina Bausch famously instructed her dancers with almost no
language, encouraging her dancers to feel their way into the dance, to get in touch with their deepest
vulnerabilities. In their papers, Sarah Mendelsohn and Deborah Dowd share with us, their audience,
ways in which they, too, struggled to get in touch with their most vulnerable selves. Caught in an
unending present with their challenging, traumatized patients, their struggle to locate themselves, and
their own vulnerabilities in their patients, to experience the shame of their own childhood trauma,
allowed for enlivened creative movement and profound psychic change.

In the extraordinary documentary Pina (2011), Wim Wenders’s homage to Pina Bausch, dancers
collide and fall in unexpected ways. They slip! and fall backward or sideways, suspended
momentarily in midair … before being caught by another dancer at the last possible moment.
Past and future collapse as the powerful 3D filming brings us, the audience, right into the
intensity of the present. And time falls away. It’s violent, erotic, immersive.
Pina Bausch’s work, like analysis, involves play and improvisation (Ringstrom, 2001), and
demands of the dancer/analyst a robustness and fortitude, and an exquisite attunement to bodily
experience. In her “dance-theater” (Tanztheater), Bausch famously instructed her dancers with
almost no language. She encouraged her dancers to feel their way into the dance, to get in touch
with their deepest vulnerabilities. Similarly, in their beautiful papers, Sarah Mendelsohn and
Deborah Dowd (both in this issue) share with us, their audience, ways in which they, too,
struggled to get in touch with their most vulnerable selves. Caught in an unending present with
their challenging, traumatized patients, their openness to engage with their own childhood
ghosts, to experience the shame and helplessness of their childhood trauma, Nietzsche’s “lone-
liest loneliness,” allowed creative movement to flow. As Philip Bromberg would say, it was not
until they could get in touch with not-me parts of themselves, and the shame embedded in those
dissociated memories, that they were able to connect to the not-me parts of their patients.
I have been writing about the challenges and creative potential of mutual vulnerability (Levine,
2009, 2012, 2016a, 2016b), the ways in which, as analysts, our patients’ trauma goes through and
through us, haunting and dysregulating, as it interweaves with our own wounds and unmourned

Correspondence should be addressed to Lauren Levine, Ph.D., 330 West 58th Street, Suite 311, New York, NY
10019, USA. E-mail: lauren.levine8@gmail.com
 PINA BAUSCH AND INTERWEAVING OF TRAUMA 95

losses (Harris, 2009; Levine, 2016b). The courage to engage deeply in psychoanalysis entails
reckoning with our own bad objects, our own nightmares and capacity for destructiveness. I am
interested in the ways in which mutual vulnerability, openness to our own ghosts and unresolved
traumas, can unfreeze time and create a renewed, mutual sense of creativity and flow in analysis. As I
described in a recent paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (Levine, 2016a) about a mutual survival of
destructiveness and its creative potential for agency and desire, the analyst needs to be able to
embrace and bear those damaging introjects that interweave and collide with her own ungrieved
losses (Harris, 2009) in order for enlivened therapeutic movement and psychic change to occur.
Riffing on Italian playwright Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ferro
(1992) posited that the minds of the analyst and patient, two authors, work together to commu-
nicate what is happening at the depths of the relational exchange, to create a meaningful dialogue
that integrates past and present, in the here and now. Ghosts from the intergenerational histories of
both analyst and patient enter and exit the analytic stage, and the analyst must creatively engage
with the multiple characters that emerge in the relational field. Mendelsohn and Dowd (this issue),
two author-analysts, dared to make contact with the various, and at times deadly, characters of their
traumatized patients by courageously “inhabiting their vulnerability” (Whyte, 2014), opening
access to their own dissociated little girl selves. I love Mendelsohn’s quote by David Whyte
(2014), so resonant to my own writing on mutual vulnerability and to both Mendelsohn and
Dowd’s papers. Whyte wrote, “The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our
vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our
intimacy with disappearance” (p. 234). To me, this implies that living passionately in the present
requires grief and mourning (Harris, 2009; Levine, 2016a), reckoning with our own limitations and
mortality (Frommer, 2005, 2016; Slavin, 2013), and struggling to work, and help our patients work
in the depressive position (Cooper, 2016a, 2016b).
George Atwood (2015) suggested,

To engage with people in the extremes of psychological disorder is to cast oneself into the chaos, to
embark upon a harrowing journey with an uncertain outcome. … We are therefore involved in the
psychological disturbances we are called upon to treat, and the wounds requiring healing in our
patients are matched by the wounds we carry in our own hearts. (p. 142)

Dowd and Mendelsohn embark on different sorts of harrowing journeys, but both cast
themselves into the destabilizing chaos of their patients’ inner worlds—by looking into their
own wounded hearts. They struggle to locate themselves, and their own vulnerabilities, in their
patients before their patients can feel deeply recognized and “come-in-to-being” (Winnicott,
1960). For Bob and Jay to have the profound experience of seeing themselves reflected through
their analysts’ eyes, Dowd and Mendelsohn have to risk opening themselves up to waking
dreams (Bion, Ferro, Ogden) of their own disturbing losses. Both Dowd and Mendelsohn write
about father loss— Dowd the early traumatic death of her father, and Mendelsohn a different
kind of heartbreaking loss, her father’s slippage into incapacitation and dementia.
Mendelsohn has spent the past few days committing her father—against his will—to a geriatric
psychiatric facility. She is sweaty and exhausted but is trying now, in the coolness of her office, to
shift gears, to get rid of the shameful memory of her father in handcuffs, covered in bodily fluids,
the guilt of having had him committed, and her mounting sadness over the loss of him. She wants
urgently to wipe away the anger and anguish of seeing her psychiatrist father so shrunken in
stature, and so rageful toward her. She wants dearly to be present for her patient, Jay.
96 LEVINE

We’ve all been there. As psychoanalysts we’ve had sick parents or children, or personal crises
in our own lives, that we have to deal with while we sit through hours of seeing patients. We’ve
checked our voicemails between sessions and gotten unexpectedly upsetting, destabilizing news.
Our histories and current life challenges interweave inexorably with our patients, and at times we
must struggle to manage our own stress and anxiety as best we can to focus attentively on our
patients. But make no mistake, it is a struggle. As Ken Corbett poetically captured in his speech
at the 2012 NYU Postdoc graduation (mine, in fact): “A bipolar patient will leave for Buenos
Aires on vacation and never return, the new moon will float like a rib at the edge of night, your
nephew will end up in rehab for the second time. And your next patient is in the waiting room.”
The impossible profession, indeed …
Mendelsohn tells us that Jay worships her, that she is the only woman for him. But this
idealization is brittle and dependent on Mendelsohn’s attunement to Jay’s subtlest experience. He
finds her “therapy questions” maddening and humiliating because he cannot find her, because as
hard as she is trying, she is not present or coming from an authentically alive place in herself—and
Jay knows it. He is acutely sensitive and vulnerable to preoccupied mothers. So it is not surprising
when Mendelsohn tells us she sees Jay looking back at someone that neither of them recognizes.
With Jay, there is frequently a mutual sense of flow, a sense of being in time together, and then
suddenly, abruptly, Mendelsohn says the wrong thing, their subjectivities collide, and Jay gets
enraged, time stands still. It shocks her every time.
Jay’s slip of the tongue, “Don’t event,” which is confusing and disorganizing to Jay, has a
different impact on Mendelsohn (p. 80, italics in the original). It wakes her up. Wait, let’s play
here awhile, Mendelsohn communicates to Jay. As Ogden (2009) suggested, opening space for
reverie and free association is a process of the making the conscious unconscious—a process of
waking up to ourselves, dreaming ourselves and our patients into existence. Jay’s seemingly
nonsensical “Don’t event” makes Mendelsohn curious, about Jay’s associations and her own. It
triggers a reverie of an earlier time, a time when she was the child, hurt and angry, looking for
recognition from her daddy. Something about his slip of the tongue opens Mendelsohn to
another register, a much younger self-state. Openness to her own vulnerable, childlike states
allows Mendelsohn to open herself up to Jay’s experience, to feel his narcissistic injury and rage
from the inside out, helping her and Jay break out of a mutually dissociated enactment.
Mendelsohn calls Jay’s slip poetic, but it is actually Mendelsohn’s inspired willingness to play,
and to invite Jay to play with her, like Winnicott’s Squiggle game, that allows for the co-creation
of creativity and poetry. I think Jay sensed her preoccupation with her father, but the harder she
tried to ignore her own anger, existential terror, and deep sense of loss, to try to be “present” with
Jay, the more he sensed her distance, her affective abandonment. It was Jay’s slip that allowed
Mendelsohn to play in her own imagination, to have that reverie of her little girl self with her big,
strong, alive daddy, to see and sense that her father could survive her rage. That is what allowed
her to genuinely connect with Jay’s traumatized, abandoned, and angry little boy self. That is what
allowed her to sense and give him what his mom couldn’t, and what he really needed, to know that
she was “still here.”
Mendelsohn writes,

In turning our mutually created event inside out, there are threads of sorrow, shame, and loss that
connect us at the seams, but also fray and tear, leaving Jay feeling ripped apart and ripped away. …
 PINA BAUSCH AND INTERWEAVING OF TRAUMA 97

Did we actually reach each other that day? Or did we each endure a transient unbridgeable moment,
an empty boardwalk? (pp. 83–84)

Threads, frayed and torn, yet newly connected at the seams. The poignant and inevitable
incompleteness of our work, the necessity of loss and mourning in the service of growth and
change, reminiscent of Steven Cooper’s (2016a, 2016b) work on the mutuality of the depressive
position, on the vital importance of the analyst’s reckoning with her own limitations, the limits
of analysis, and the inexorableness of mortality. And yet. Mendelsohn is “still here,” which is
shocking and profoundly moving to Jay (p. 81).
While at first glance Dowd’s patient, Bob, seems to be living in the present, she soon registers
that he is a man in pieces, or more aptly a shattered 12-year-old boy, fractured, unintelligible, full
of Bion’s nameless dread. Dowd tells us that Bob has shut himself into a grief-stricken vault,
which she tries her best to crawl into but often finds herself trying in vain to pull Bob out of.
There are echoes here of Abraham and Torok’s (1984) notion of endocryptic identification, the
creation of a haunted, closed-off space, a crypt, around a gaping wound—a ghostly identification
with a traumatically lost object (p. 223).
I understand Dowd’s sense of urgency to pull Bob out of the past, to try to transform the
traumatized adolescent into a functioning adult, to hold on to hope for a psychic future (Cooper,
1997, 2010). But the more she pulls, the more he retreats. It’s only when she realizes that she’s
responding defensively to Bob, and can try her best to go gently into this space, that Bob can
tolerate her presence. I think we can all relate to the impulse to try to stand on the edge and try to
pull our patients out of the abyss of a suicidal depression, or away from self-punishing
masochistic patterns– to stop torturing themselves. But, in order to reach Bob, Dowd needed
to imagine her way into the ghostly characters of Bob’s inner world, “the horror, the horror” of
his “Heart of Darkness”, to hold him, and hold him in mind, without holding on to a sense of
hope (Levine, 2016a). It’s only when Dowd has the courage to let go of trying to rescue Bob,
and to paradoxically abandon her efforts to make him intelligible to her that Bob can risk letting
her get to know those fragmented, dissociated, and most shameful parts of himself. Her flash-
backs to her own unassimilated trauma help break through her dissociation, to recognize the life-
preserving aspects of her own childhood need for ghosts. This was key to Bob’s being willing to
take the risk of feeling his way into Kevin’s agonizing world, to grieve without falling apart
himself. This entailed what Frommer (2005) called “living in the liminal spaces of mortality”.
Dowd writes that, in the context of their work together—work that, “as Slavin… describe[d],”
crucially included “[her] own reciprocal frozen-in-time childhood grief” (p. 76)—Bob feels
profoundly recognized and accepted. A sense of ‘I am’ emerges (Winnicott, 1958). As Dowd
manages to feel her way into Bob’s ghosts from the inside out through access to her own grief,
she feels less afraid, and Bob feels more human, less like an alien. And Bob feels less alien to
her. Once Dowd can make room in the consulting room for their mutual ghosts, and Bob can see
and feel Dowd’s awareness and recognition of his ghosts, Bob becomes less haunted. His ghosts
can be “‘mostly no longer seen and only sometimes…felt, … like Kevin is with [him]–not gone
and not against [him]’” (p. 75). Of course, this was a challenging, nonlinear process, full of
ruptures and repair (Benjamin, 2004), and Dowd was strikingly willing (with Bob and with us,
her readers) to acknowledge her frustrations and misattunements. Dowd’s struggle to embrace
Bob’s ghosts as sacred and essential parts of him allowed him to feel known and recognized on
98 LEVINE

the deepest level, mitigating his profound shame and enabling him to live more fully in the
present, to become a self in time (Harris & Bartlett, 2016; Seligman, 2016).
One of the most moving moments in Dowd’s paper in my mind, a true moment of meeting and
opening in the work, was when she can finally feel the presence of Bob’s ghosts and commu-
nicates to Bob that she understands how excruciating it feels to be with them. Dowd says,

“It’s hard, sitting here with them.” He peers up at [her], “You feel them?” “Yes,” [she says.] “I
do.”…“You okay?” he asks. “Yes,” [she replies.] “I am.” (p. 73, emphasis added)

In this deceptively simple exchange, Dowd communicates something quite profound and
reparative. She becomes a new sturdier, non-collapsing mother who can hold and embrace all of
Bob’s most shameful parts (Levine, 2009), and she is letting him know that she can survive, and
help him survive their ruthlessness.
This brings to mind Dori Laub’s work on the crucial impact of witnessing in the survival and
recovery from severe trauma. Laub (2017) wrote,

Testimony is a powerful libido driven process of putting fragments together, creating a whole,
making such a whole a part of ones experiential landscape in a temporal, historical sequence,
historicizing it, restoring the narrative flow and associatively linking it to other experiences and to
the experiencing “I.” Testimony is a process of symbolizing the concrete so that the traumatic
experience can become communicable to oneself and known and transmittable to an “other,” thus
producing an experience that can be known, remembered, transmitted and forgotten. (p. 30)

Early on, Bob can access and communicate only dissociated parts of himself on scraps of
paper, not exactly to Dowd but for her. But, in the process of their deep work together, Bob takes
the huge risk of expanding these notes on scraps into “Dear Deborah letters,” filled with stories
of brutal self-mutilation and torture. His self-mutilation served multiple functions including
identification with his tormented brother, self- punishment for his own survival, and a numbing
of the torturous pain he carried inside. After Kevin killed himself, in his deadened state, Bob
stopped listening to music, painting, and playing sports.
Over their years of analysis, as Dowd found her way to bear witness to the dead and tortured
parts of him, Bob reawakened—came to life!—allowing for a mutual opening of mourning and
creativity. As Bob finally felt safe enough to tap into his artistic voice, music and art and
beautiful, heartbreaking poetry seemed to pour forth. Through his transformative treatment with
Dowd, Bob found a way to channel the chaos of his childhood trauma—trauma that shattered
and deadened him, robbing him of his vitality and creativity—into a healing beauty and art form.
With Dowd as his witness, and his audience, he began to write and paint and make music again,
which, along with the analysis, became the creative vehicle through which he could finally
grieve the suicide of his beloved brother and re-emerge as a newfound self. Sharing his artwork
with Dowd was indeed a gift, and I believe, as I wrote in a recent paper about a challenging
analysis with a suicidal patient, “a token of gratitude for accompanying him on this perilous
journey, through dark unknown waters, and for not losing faith in him” (Levine, 2016a, p. 38).
Words in a story, Ogden (2009) suggested, whether it be a work of fiction or an analytic
narrative, create experiences to be lived by the reader. Ogden spoke of “dreaming up a text” as
“the conscious and unconscious psychological work of making something of one’s own with the
text one is reading. The text is the starting point for the reader’s own creative act” (p. 9).
 PINA BAUSCH AND INTERWEAVING OF TRAUMA 99

While writing this discussion, immersed in Mendelsohn’s and Dowd’s texts, I had a dream, a
time traveling dream of my own. In the dream, I wanted to read Dowd’s paper, and I was
looking for a quiet place to read. I felt a distinct sense that it was getting late, that I was running
out of time. Suddenly, I found myself in my childhood apartment, and I walked into my parents’
old bedroom. My mother, who died 4 years ago, before her time, was lying on her bed reading,
very much alive. I had no sense of this being strange, of her having died, as I was back in time
with her. “Can I read here with you, Mom?” I asked. “Sure,” she responded, and patted the space
next to her on the bed. Just then, I noticed a naked baby lying on the bed, a beautiful baby girl,
and I leaned over to smell her baby smell, to feel her baby skin on my skin.
This dream holds a dizzying array of self-states across time, a life-time, a reawakening and a
rebirth. A Ferenczian “dialogue of unconsciouses,” my dream weaves together threads of
Mendelsohn’s and Dowd’s evocative papers, as well as pieces of my own history/herstory. It
holds aspects of memory and desire, attachment and mourning, ghosts of mothers, and babies. In
my desire to read Dowd’s paper, I am aware of myself as reader and writer, embodying my adult,
creative self. There is a longing for my mother, for snuggling and bedtime stories, longing for a
safe refuge amidst all this trauma. And there is wistfulness about the passage of time, about
aging and mortality. Nostalgia as a mother, for those early days when my now grown sons were
babies, sensory memories of soft baby skin and delicious baby smells. There are multiple
dimensions of time: running out of time, being back in time, the fantasy of stopping time—of
staying right here, right now, forever.
My dream undoes time, undoes death, takes place in the liminal realm of the melancholic. It
captures aspects of Dowd’s and Mendelsohn’s treatments, evoking the nonlinearity of time in
analysis, a Laplanchian retranscribing of traumatic experience, après coup. Mendelsohn’s reverie
of her father’s inviting look at the end of the boardwalk. Dowd’s uncanny flashbacks of her own
childhood need for ghosts. My re-enlivened mother’s patting the space next to her on the bed.
Bids for attachment and connection, poignant reminders of longing and loss. In search of lost
time (Proust, 1913/2003) …
In her dreamlike dance-theater, Pina Bausch takes an unflinching look at human relationships
and human emotions: need, fear, shame, desire, rage, and despair. Central to Bausch’s surreal,
impassioned dance is the shock! of trauma, its violence and haunting residue. Velleda Ceccoli
(2012) wrote,

Pina Bausch wasn’t interested in how people move, but rather, what moves them. Dance emerges as
the very basis of a different language, the language of human experience accessing emotions directly
—then she goes further, into the emotional resonance of others. Dance thus becomes the language of
trauma re-worked and extended through our common bond—our humanity.

The film Pina was created in the wake of tragedy and shocking loss. It was originally a
joint project, a thrilling collaboration between Wim Wenders and Pina Bausch, but Bausch
died quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the process of making the film. Devastated, Wenders
walked away from the film, but the dancers in the company pleaded with him to come back,
to not abandon the project. Wenders ultimately decided that the only way he could make the
film was to remake it, to create a new version, no longer with Pina but for her—an elegy to
Pina.
Like Mendelsohn’s and Dowd’s powerful treatments with Jay and Bob, the film holds
multiple layers of trauma and creativity, trauma interrupting/disrupting creativity, and then
100 LEVINE

creativity reimagined, re-enlivened, co-created as transitional object. So reminiscent of Ogden’s

notion of mourning, as Dowd suggests in her paper, as

a demand … to create something— … a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, … that begins to

meet, to be equal to, the full complexity of our relationship to what has been lost. …
Paradoxically, in this process, we are enlivened by the experience of loss and death, even
when what is given up or taken from us [fathers, mothers, brothers, artistic directors] is an
aspect of ourselves. (Ogden, 2000, p. 65)

Reflecting on these evocative papers, I am struck by the ways in which art—poetry, music,
painting, and writing—served as vital windows into different registers of time and traumatic
loss; dysregulating, as Mendelsohn suggests, “the rigid frame of time present opening up an
imaginative form of time travel for both [patient and analyst]” (p. 83, italics in the original). I’m
struck, too, by the creative physicality, by Dowd’s and Mendelsohn’s use of embodied, somatic
dimensions of enacted experience. Finding their way into their patients’ lived and “unlived”
experience took courage!—what Slavin (2013) called “radical empathy,” which entailed plumb-
ing the depths of their own injuries and abandonments. As Dowd and Mendelsohn have
illustrated through their powerful journeys with Bob and Jay, the essential and emergent
experience of transforming trauma through mourning requires a mutual “inhabiting” of loss
and trauma, creating the potential for an awakening of aliveness and creativity, for both analyst
and patient.

REFERENCES

Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1984). “The lost object—Me”: Notes on identification within the crypt. Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, 4, 221–242. doi:10.1080/07351698409533542
Atwood, G. (2015). Credo and reflections. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25, 137–152. doi:10.1080/
10481885.2015.1013826
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An tntersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1),
5–46.
Ceccoli, V. (2012). Feeling Pina: How the choreographer moved people. Retrieved from http://psychologytomorrowma
gazine.com/feeling-pina-how-the-choreographer-moved-people
Cooper, S. H. (1997). Interpretation and the psychic future. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 78, 667–681.
Cooper, S. H. (2010). A disturbance in the field. London, UK: Routledge.
Cooper, S. H. (2016a). The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s relationship to the depressive
position. London, UK: Routledge.
Cooper, S. H. (2016b). Mourning, regeneration, and the psychic future: A discussion of Levine’s “A mutual survival of
destructiveness and its creative potential for agency and desire.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26, 56–62. doi:10.1080/
10481885.2016.1123517
Corbett, K. (2012). All of these things will happen. Graduation Speech at New York University Postdoctoral Program in
Psychoanalysis, New York, NY.
Ferro, A. (1992). Two authors in search of characters: The relationship, the field, the story. Rivista di Psicoanalisi, 38(1),
44–90.
Frommer, M. (2005). Living in the liminal spaces of mortality. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 15, 479–498. doi:10.1080/
10481881509348845
Frommer, M. (2016). Death is nothing at all: On contemplating non-existence. A relational psychoanalytic engagement of
the fear of death. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26(4), 373–390.
Harris, A. (2009). You must remember this. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19, 2–21. doi:10.1080/10481880802634537
 PINA BAUSCH AND INTERWEAVING OF TRAUMA 101

Harris, A., & Bartlett, R. (2016). A window in time: A response to “Disorders of temporality and the subjective
experience of time: Unresponsive objects and the vacuity of the future” by Stephen Seligman. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 26, 110–128. doi:10.1080/10481885.2016.1144956
Laub, D. (2017). Reestablishing the internal “thou” in testimony of trauma. In J. Alpert & E. Goren (Eds.),
Psychoanalysis, trauma, and community: History and contemporary reappraisals (pp. 27–42). London, UK:
Routledge.
Levine, L. (2009). Transformative aspects of our own analyses and their resonance in our work with our patients.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19, 454–462. doi:10.1080/10481880903088641
Levine, L. (2012). Into thin air: The co-construction of shame, recognition, and creativity in an analytic process.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22, 456–471. doi:10.1080/10481885.2012.701140
Levine, L. (2016a). A mutual survival of destructiveness and its creative potential for agency and desire. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 26, 36–49. doi:10.1080/10481885.2016.1123511
Levine, L. (2016b). Mutual vulnerability: Intimacy, psychic collisions, and the shards of trauma. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 26, 571–579. doi:10.1080/10481885.2016.1214471
Ogden, T. (2000). Borges and the art of mourning. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10, 65–88. doi:10.1080/
10481881009348522
Ogden, T. (2009). Rediscovering psychoanalysis: Thinking and dreaming, learning and forgetting. London, UK:
Routledge.
Proust, M. (2003). In search of lost time. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmarten, Trans.). New York, NY: Modern
Library. (Original work published 1913)
Ringstrom, P. (2001). Cultivating the improvisational in psychoanalytic treatment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11,
727–754. doi:10.1080/10481881109348640
Seligman, S. (2016). Disorders of temporality and the subjective experience of time: Unresponsive objects and the
vacuity of the future. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26, 110–128. doi:10.1080/10481885.2016.1144954
Slavin, M. O. (2013). Meaning, mortality, and the search for realness and reciprocity: An evolutionary/existential
perspective on Hoffman’s Dialectical Constructivism. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23, 296–314. doi:10.1080/
10481885.2013.794643
Wenders, W. & Ringel, G.-P. (Producers), & Wenders, W. (Director). (2011). Pina [Film]. Germany: Neue Road Movies.
Whyte, D. (2014). Consolations: The solace, nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words. Langley, WA:
Many Rivers Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The theory of the parent–infant relationship. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41,
585–595.

CONTRIBUTOR

Lauren Levine, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study
Center, and Co-Director of the One Year Introductory Program in Relational Studies. She is
Visiting Faculty at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute for Relational and
Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece. Dr. Levine is on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic
Dialogues and has published papers on transformative aspects of the analyst’s own analysis and
their resonance in work with patients, ways in which shame, recognition, and creativity are co-
constructed in analytic realms, trauma, and mutual vulnerability. She is a psychoanalyst in
private practice in New York City.
Copyright of Psychoanalytic Dialogues is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright
holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.