The following interview was conducted over the course of two conversations between Joe Lichtenberg and Judy Teicholz, several weeks apart. The first interview deals primarily with Joe's professional development, and the second addresses the more personal aspects and events of Joe's life.

Judy: Your Motivational Systems Theory brings together significant aspects of Freudian drive theory, object relations theory, self psychology, and contemporary relational theory. Did you deliberately set out to create such a comprehensive and integrative theory of psychoanalysis?

Joe: It really evolved by accident. In the 1970s I wrote a paper called "The Development of the Sense of Self." It related traditional theory to Mahler and Kohut and was published in JAPA. Then I was invited to be on a Panel [at the American Psychoanalytic] called "Development of the Object." At that meeting Daniel Shapiro said there was a need for somebody to review the emergent field of infant research. He thought I had the kind of mind that could appreciate the work being done, and that I'd be able to help other people see its value. At the time there were very few books on the topic - today, the books would fill a library. I reviewed what information I could find and wrote a series of papers which became Psychoanalysis and Infant Research (published in 1983). Two years later Dan Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant created quite a stir in the psychoanalytic world.

Judy: But how did you get from a review of the infant research to a comprehensive motivational systems theory?

Joe: Based on the findings of infant research I could no longer accept traditional theory. But it's one thing to tear the house down and quite another to build it back up again on a more secure footing. I thought that any new theory would have to be based on a systems concept. So I wanted to move from concepts of structure, through experience, to systems. I also felt that it would have to include motivation as a fundamental concept. And I just thought and thought about what the motivations are that all analysts struggle with. I took to heart Lou Sanders' proposition that to come up with anything meaningful you have to look at many different moments over the course of 24 hours between mother and infant.

What I came up with started with the basic physiological needs for sleep, eating and nutrition, warmth, proprioceptive activity, touch - and the mother and infant regulating each other around these activities. And beyond these there were the positive aspects of attachment, expressed through all the ways that mother and infant communicate or "talk" to each other. And then sometimes mother and infant leave each other alone and the baby's eyes wander and gaze at a mobile, or the baby might listen to music and explore her surroundings. This fits with Winnicott's capacity to be alone, in the presence of the other. But babies also fuss, cry, push things away, or turn away from what's presented. They can show antagonism or withdrawal, and this aversiveness is not always aggression but it is part of a fight or flight reaction. Finally there's something with babies that isn't sexuality to begin with but starts with sensuality, because babies are highly sensual beings. These are all things you see invariably over time, and you see shifting combinations and changing dominance among the five motivations. I kept testing out these 5 motivations by looking at mother/infant data, and I asked dozens of colleagues to tell me if they could think of any other motivations that I had left out. No one could come up with anything that couldn't be subsumed under these 5 motivations.

When there is concordance between the motivations that are activated in mother and child, we see mutual regulation. When disparity persists, it leads to disruptions and a tendency to solidify aversiveness. And in treatment, if the analyst is able to be concordant - through empathic connection with the dominant motivation of the patient - mutual regulation and exploration can go forward. Inversely, when the dominant motivations in patient and analyst are discrepant, there's a disruption in the relationship that leads to aversive states and a mutual feeling such as "I don't understand you."

This work finally became Psychoanalysis and Motivation (published in 1989). It put forth a far-reaching thesis, and cited support from infant studies, from neurophysiology, and from clinical practice. It wasn't that I was saying anything new, because other analysts had already identified each of the 5 motivations in my system. But in each case, just one or two of the five motivations were at the center of the theory.

Judy: Yes, you were the first to bring all these motivations together under the rubric of a single theory. Can you say something about your very productive collaborations with Frank Lachmann and Jim Fosshage?

Joe: I began working with Frank and Jim on Self and Motivational Systems: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Technique (published in 1992). We were struggling with the question: how can we derive a clinical approach from the motivational systems theory? Then we collaborated on The Clinical Exchange: Techniques Derived from Self and Motivational Systems (published in 1996). In that book we demonstrate 10 principles of psychoanalytic treatment, as illustrated in a single psychoanalysis of 9 years' duration. It was a case of mine, and the book includes notes explaining my thinking as I engaged in the treatment.

There were a couple of other ideas I wanted to take up, ideas embroiled in current debate and controversy: such as the question of provision versus insight, and the question of verbal versus nonverbal or implicit versus explicit interaction. As Dan Stern once said: "Why talk?" But there's a story behind that.

Dan and I were invited to speak at a large meeting of Body and Movement therapists in Bonn, Germany. We had written about the fundamental importance of movement-together and movement-apart, between mothers and infants. At the conference there was a demonstration by Body Movement therapists of how they try to alter a (procedural form of) relational problem at the level of procedural body movement. Then they asked Dan and me to help them formulate an interview to discuss what had taken place in the dance. Before I could respond, Dan said: "Why talk?"

I think I understood what Dan felt that made him say this, but I also thought that Dan's question needed a real answer. I wanted to answer the question: "Why talk?" And so came about [my concept of] "A Spirit Of Inquiry."

I don't like to see people frame the issue as provision versus insight. I think that communication is the overarching concept that gets us out of the whole [false dichotomy] of relationship versus talk, or procedural learning versus verbal interpretation & insight. I wanted to go from breaking things down to finding the larger concepts, and I think communication covers it all. Whether the analytic situation is dyadic or not in a formalistic sense, it's dyadic in the intrapsychic sense (as in self-with-other). And everything we do as analysts, [everything that happens between patient and analyst,] can be understood as communication. It is communication that makes intimacy possible between two people, or even within a single individual - intimacy with the self, if you will.

What characterizes an analysis - what sustains it as psychoanalysis through all its permutations - is the analyst's spirit of inquiry. And communication is the medium for the expression of that spirit. The analyst starts with the spirit of inquiry, and then, finally, the patient joins the analyst in the inquiry.

Judy: Yes, but usually a lot has already transpired in the analytic relationship by the time the patient can join the analyst in the spirit of inquiry. Can you say something about the relationship between these concepts and the concept of self?

Joe: I try to move away from "self" in the structural sense, to a "sense of self" [experientially]. We develop various aspects of how we sense ourselves. For instance, as analysts our professional sense of self is maintained through a spirit of inquiry.

Judy: What about the relationship between your five motivational systems and the self?

Joe: Motivations are aspects of the self in their particularities.

Judy: And in the clinical situation, how do these ideas take us beyond Kohut's self psychology?

Joe: I don't like to say beyond, I like to say a widening of. The only answers we have are in the consequences of our interventions. We do what we do and then we see what consequence it has. Within our technical approach we talk about disciplined spontaneous engagements - rather than calling them enactments. From the viewpoint of nonlinear systems theory, you don't know in advance how things will impact, what will lead to what.

Judy: Can you think of a clinical example in which the impact of what you did was quite unexpected?

Joe: I think of the patient Sonya [a very depressed woman who had absolutely refused to consider antidepressants. I had finally given up mentioning them]. One day there was a long silence in our session. Then she finally looked up at me and said, "What?" I said to her, "You look like a sad little kitten." To my total amazement, she thought a bit, and then said, "All right, I'll go on antidepressants." Shortly after that session, she came in and said "I have a surprise for you. I just got a kitten." And much of the next phase of her analysis had to do with her mothering the kitten so that the kitten (as well as the sad kitten Sonya) would no longer be sad.

I'm always trying to understand the complexity of communication in all its modalities. But the spirit of inquiry stays, it carries through the whole analysis. The spirit of inquiry helps the patient to develop intimacy with [previously disavowed] parts of the self.

Judy: Would you say that mutual empathy would be a precondition for intimacy?

Joe: Empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is very important too.

Judy: If the spirit of inquiry facilitates intimacy and is what characterizes the psychoanalytic relationship, what would you say it is that distinguishes the parent-child relationship?

Joe: Parenting should be conducted under a spirit of provision, as opposed to a spirit of inquiry. The inquiry the parent makes - "what's up with you?" - has as its goal to discover and to provide what is needed.

Judy: And what about provision in psychoanalysis?

Joe: The analyst's spirit of inquiry is to understand what provisions are essentially needed for the patient, and to help the patient make use of those that arise as part of an exploratory treatment. [At the same time, the analysis fosters the patient's ability] to seek selfobject experiences from anywhere and everywhere, in all parts of his or her life [and this greatly expands on the provision that is available from psychoanalysis itself].

Judy: So in psychoanalysis, the idea is to help the patient to seek and find provision elsewhere.

Joe: I think so. If provision becomes too much the central goal of a psychoanalysis, that's adoption not treatment.

Judy: I think you've just made a distinction between psychoanalytic processes and the formative developmental relationships of childhood. I'd be interested to hear about the personal experiences that you think were formative in the development of your interest in psychoanalysis.

Joe: I'm probably one of the very few people who ever went to medical school specifically to become a psychoanalyst.

Judy: You knew what you wanted that early in the process?

Joe: Yes, as a child I was told by my grandmother that I would be a doctor. She wanted to be a doctor herself, but in those days women didn't go to medical school. Eventually she married a man from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who'd made his fortune in business. But after a while she moved back to Baltimore, where she'd been raised. She volunteered as an auditor at Johns Hopkins and built a medical library that wound up in my section of our house. Unfortunately though, she was contemptuous of her own two daughters, one of whom was my mother. I was born when my mother was only nineteen, and I was anointed a doctor at birth. My mother dismissed my father when I was nine months old, and I grew up in a big town house in Baltimore with my mother, my aunt, and my maternal grandparents. I saw my father daily, though, because he never lived more than 5 blocks away. He was a lawyer, and had a brother who was a successful doctor.

It was a German Jewish community with many doctors in the neighborhood. There was a pediatrician who lived nearby who took me on medical rounds with him starting when I was eight or nine. Even at that age, I can say that I would do anything anyone told me to do - as long as I agreed with it!

Judy: Well I'm sure that attitude to authority has contributed importantly to how innovative you've been able to be.

Joe: I also made a meteoric run through school - I graduated from high school at the age of 15 and finished Johns Hopkins [undergraduate] by the time I was 17 and a half. Then I went to mid-shipman school, because this was during World War 2, and I was an officer in the Navy by age 19. I became an aide to the Executive Officer of the Flotilla Command in the Pacific, and was the person in charge of handling all of the records. I was on a Destroyer in the Pacific.

Judy: You didn't feel overwhelmed by such daunting responsibility at such an early age?

Joe: I just put one foot in front of the other. While in the Navy, I finally asked myself: "What do I want to do?" - not just "What was I told to do?" There was a shift from automatic accommodation [to others' ideas for me] to: "Do I really want to be a doctor?" I didn't want to be a lawyer like my father because that seemed boring. I thought about being a businessman like my grandfather, and although I liked the idea of making money, that didn't seem a like a good fit.

At 15 I had read all of Freud's Introductory Lectures and many of Eugene O'Neill's plays. Based on these readings, I wanted to be a psychoanalyst! So I went to medical school. I went to the University of Maryland Medical School, which I didn't like. But I formed a group with my cadaver-mates whom I did like: Ernest Wolf and Jay Bisgyer. We got several fellow students together and we started our own school within the school. The eight "students" and three "faculty" would all come over to my house, and we would do our own teaching and self-learning. It was a lot better than the official learning we got in the medical school.

Judy: And did you learn anything during medical school that pulled you away from your original interest in psychoanalysis?

Joe: No. I never wavered in my desire to become an analyst. In my last year of medical school, I started a personal analysis with a wonderful young woman [named Helen Arthur]. She was excellent and was probably a candidate. I formed an intense oedipal attachment to her. I also went to work at a state hospital, where the assistant superintendent was a friend of my father's. The newspapers had called it "Maryland's Shame." I gave electric shocks there and ran the insulin coma unit. I got married after my third year of medical school. I chose to intern at a small hospital because I knew I'd be given more responsibility there, and get to do more things than I would at one of the big teaching hospitals. I loved the craft of medicine. I delivered babies and assisted on operations, and I loved all that. But I didn't want to spend my life doing it.

I had continued in my analysis with the wonderful young woman, Helen Arthur. I came out of my sessions crying often. I had one experience with her that particularly confirmed my belief in the unconscious. Throughout my analysis I had frequent dreams and I spoke of them regularly in my sessions. All of a sudden at one point, I stopped having dreams and was in a nothing state. Then I had a dream, something to do with blood. My analyst said something about menstruation and I said in a loud, angry voice - in a voice unlike any I had ever spoken in - "NO NO NO!" And she said: "That's right, no blood. I'm pregnant."

Then she died suddenly without warning, of a rare complication of pregnancy. Her husband called one week to say she'd be missing a session because of illness. And a week later she was dead.

After her death I started what proved to be a very unhelpful training analysis with Loewald. I learned much from it about what not to do as an analyst. He made frequent disparaging remarks about my previous analyst and about my analytic work with her. One time when I was crying about her death, and about my grandfather who had also died recently, Loewald said: "That was not an analysis - all she did was hold your hand." I quit with Loewald soon after that.

Judy: How long had you stuck it out with Loewald at the time you quit?

Joe: It was after 2 or 3 years. While I was on the couch with him I used to have a fantasy that I was a crab lying on my back - I felt I had metamorphized into a crab with Loewald's treatment. And what do crabs do when they're on their backs? They do everything in their power to get themselves turned over. And that's what I did. I got up off the couch and I left Loewald. I risked being dismissed from training, which in my frustration I was ready to accept. But other people in the Institute wouldn't let me shut the door so irrevocably on my training. They saw to it that my candidacy wasn't terminated, but just put on hold. I was working at Shepard Pratt Hospital and eventually became Clinical Director there. I worked with Lewis Hill - he was probably to Baltimore's psychiatric community what Semrad was to Boston's.

Hill encouraged me to finish my analytic training and told me to go to Russell Anderson to finish my training analysis. He said Anderson was a fine gentleman. I said, "But you've also made disparaging remarks about Anderson's clinical skills, on many occasions!" And Hill said, "How come you were willing to believe me when I disparaged him but you won't trust me now, when I tell you to finish your analysis with him?" I learned that even though Anderson could not help me in certain areas, especially those of "narcissism," I could still make the best of what I could get from him and not fret about what I couldn't.

Judy: When was this, and at what institute?

Joe: This was about 1960, at the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. I guess I was 35 years old at the time. I became a local expert in ego psychology and trained a lot of people at Shepard Pratt: Paulina Kernberg, Marshal Edelson, Leon Wurmser. I also worked with Manfred Gutmacher on the Supreme Bench of Maryland and served as a consultant to training schools for adolescent delinquents. Then I went back to Shepard Pratt to be Clinical Director there. I loved it there until Lewis Hill died.

I was in full-time private practice in 1960-61 but continued to consult to Shepard Pratt and other hospitals. Around 1970 I moved to D.C., where I also consulted to the State Department and the CIA. That involved many really interesting facets.

It was around this time that I began my 4th analysis, a self-analysis using Kohut's first book as my guide to areas of my personality that remained problems for me.

Judy: That would've been The Analysis of the Self, published in 1971.

Joe: Yes. I was asked to review the book for the Bulletin of the Philadelphia Analytic Association. I'd never heard of Kohut. I read the book and started my review with the statement: "This book is a classic." Then Ernie Wolf called and said "We'd like to see your Review."

Judy: Before it was printed?

Joe: Yes. My immediate reaction was one of righteous indignation. But then I reminded myself that Ernie Wolf was an old friend and that I should trust him. So I kept my feelings to myself. It turned out that Kohut was in D.C. at the time and Ernie asked me to take a copy of my Review to Kohut at his hotel in Georgetown. [Of course Kohut never misused the advance copy of the Review, or in anyway interfered with its publication as written]. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Russell Anderson -

Judy: - your former analyst -

Joe: - yes, inviting me to a party for Kohut, who was in Baltimore. I accepted and later walked into a room where there was a small semi-circle of people. In the middle was a pale-looking man - interesting looking, foreign looking - who said he was there to talk about his book. He said he would say a few words and then we could talk about it, and he encouraged us to interrupt him at any point, if we had something we wanted to say. But he talked the whole time and nobody interrupted.

In the Book Review that I'd delivered to Kohut 2 weeks earlier, I'd challenged aspects of the theory but expressed great admiration for the clinical material in his book. In his presentation to the semi-circle of analysts in D.C., he took up the critical points I'd made in the book review one by one, and explained why he still stood by his theoretical positions. He didn't mention me by name, he just said "some people question this, or some people might say that."

Judy: Still, I suppose you could interpret it as a compliment to you, that he took your critique so seriously and took such trouble to respond to you in public, point by point.

Joe: Yes. And after that, I got invited to the first Self Psychology meeting in Chicago and led a workshop on transmuting internalization. Bob Stolorow and Alan Kindler were in the workshop and Bob Stolorow began corresponding with me after that. It was the beginning of a long and very productive relationship for me, with Stolorow and his [Intersubjectivity Theory] colleagues. This probably brings us up to the period we covered in the earlier part of the interview.

Judy: I think it does. In that earlier part of the interview, we were talking about provision and its role in treatment. You suggested that parenting is characterized by a spirit of provision, while psychoanalytic process is characterized by a spirit of inquiry. But you also said that the analyst helps the patient make use of the provision that comes as an integral part of treatment, and that the analyst fosters the patient's ability to find selfobject experience anywhere and everywhere else in his life. So in spite of the different emphases in parenting and treatment, I understand you to be saying that provision plays an important role in both. Can I assume that you're speaking not just from professional experience but from personal wisdom as well? - assume that you've raised children, in addition to conducting psychoanalyses?

Joe: That's right. I've raised two children from birth. My daughter Ann and my daughter Amy. And there are two other children as well. It really goes back to when I was in my first analysis, with the young Helen Arthur. Every week in her waiting room after one of my sessions, I used to see a Chinese gentleman. He was always sitting there cool as a cucumber, glancing at me as I came out Helen's office with tears streaming down my face. I hated him. One time Helen had started my session early, so we ended early. Because we ended early the Chinese gentleman was not in the waiting room that day when I left. But when I got outside I saw him rushing toward her building, looking very distraught as soon as he saw me, and asking "Me late?" Something very mean in me took over right then and I said, "Yeah. You late!"

Then he became the Director of Therapies at Chestnut Lodge while I was the Clinical Director at Shepard Pratt. And he, his wife, and I became best friends. I edited everything he wrote and he edited everything I wrote. When much later he and his wife died within 6 months of each other, my wife and I took over the parenting of their children. Their daughter Maryland was 18 at the time and already at Wellesley [College], but she came back to go to Johns Hopkins and became a doctor. She and her husband are both at NIH now. Their son William was only 13 when they died. He came to live with us and stayed straight through high school. So from then on we had 4 children - it was one family. William went to Harvard College, then on to Yale for an MD/PhD. He's at Sloan-Kettering now. Altogether from the 4 kids we have 8 grandchildren - and one grand-dog, Amy's, named Spirit.

Judy: Where do the kids and grandchildren live now?

Joe: Amy is in Annapolis, just moved back from Sedona, Arizona. Ann's in Baltimore. Maryland's 8 minutes away. And William's in New York, but we're in constant touch.

Judy: So one could say that you really know the difference between the analytic inquiry of treatment, and the provision of parenting. What you've done also says something about your amazing elasticity and generosity of spirit, as well as your wife's.

Joe: I don't know. We find all the children wonderfully easy to love. But probably more than most analysts I know, I'm always struck by the significance of ethnicity and culture - how it shapes experience. I was always fascinated by people's differences. I was raised by African-Americans - who were then of course called "Negroes" - and they were very dear to me. I had a baby-nurse until I was 3 and then until I was 7 a caretaker who was also the maid. Then Etta came. When I was getting married, years later, my mother came up to me and asked: "What on earth did you say to Etta?" I asked why she thought I had said anything to Etta, and my mother told me that Etta had just announced that she was leaving my mother's employ. When I asked Etta about it she said to me: "I told your mother I was leaving. I raised you so I'm going with you." So as a newly-wed I lived in 2 rooms, in a 4th floor walk-up - but with a maid!

I'd had two early ambitions: I was going to teach black people how to read, as I myself could do by the age of 4. It upset me that these wonderful people who were so kind to me did not know how to read for themselves. And I was going to become a surgeon and learn how to turn black people's skin white.

Judy: You were a sensitive little boy, who wanted the people you loved to have the same privileges in life that you yourself had.

Joe: Yes. I was also sensitive to the differences I saw between the German and Eastern European Jews, between my father's Conservative Judaism and my mother's Reform. I was a child-anthropologist. I wanted to understand: What was it all about? Every group had some kind of [unique but valid] perspective.

Judy: Yes, and no group saw things from all sides. So from a very early age, you were already a Critical Perspectivist!

Joe: My great-grandfather on my mother's side was a Rosenblatt from Berlin. My great grandmother was probably Irish.

Judy: Am I to understand that this left you without a deep faith, in the sense of organized religion?

Joe: That's right, but with a great belief in people's need for a sense of belonging - anything that enhances the individual's organizing principles.

Judy: This seems to be a point on which your lived experience and your professional thinking come together beautifully - I have the sense that your personal life, your clinical work, your teaching, your theoretical innovation, your writing, and your professional friendships and collaborations are all of one cloth to an unusual degree. And I'm sure there's much more you could tell me that would be of great interest to our readers, but this may be as good a place as any to end. I want to thank you very much cooperating in this interview, and for making the job so pleasurable and easy for me.