Reviews of Publications by Dr. Levis

Montague Ullman, M.D.

[Publication of this volume will be] a significant scientific contribution […] it may well turn out to be a classic. It promises a great deal and, in a scholarly way, delivers all that it does promise […] This is a book of considerable value […] powerful and important enough to exert an increasing influence on psychiatric thought in the future.

Not until this work by Levis has any comprehensive, psychodynamically sophisticated theoretical statement been developed based on system and relational principles. The combination of relational logic and system principles is a potent tool for linking psychopathology to its social matrix, something never quite satisfactorily accomplished either by
Freud or his environmentalist critics […] it seems to provide the leverage to arrest the proliferating schools of psychoanalytic theory and organize
psychodynamic thinking around  more generally agreed upon concepts, assumptions and theorems.

The material is not easy reading. It is a treatise to be digested slowly, not so much because of its complexity, but because it forces the reader to think in a different language. When the formulations are grasped they are elegant in their simplicity. The diagrams are not only helpful but necessary, because of the abstractness of the concepts.”

William Gray, M.D.

It is nothing less than a new way of ordering and conceptualizing human behavior that bridges the here-and-now with man’s long behavioral history, and it does so with both the possibility of predictive accuracy and the opportunity for variability and change. It also bridges the conceptual gaps which have existed between cognitive and emotive schools of thought, between psychoanalysis and learning theory, between the work of Jean Piaget and that of the Neo-Freudians – and, finally, between the worlds of psychology and sociology. The Formal Theory achieves this by reconciling the methodology of the ‘hard sciences,’ such as logic and mathematics with that of the ‘soft sciences,’ the disciplines of human behavior.”

Benjamin Braginsky, Ph.D.

In a sense it is a social psychological theory that preserves psychodynamics as well as social dynamics and allows us to see them from a new perspective. It is not simply a theory for psychiatry; it is a social scientific theory that preserves the richness of understanding the individual, but not at the cost of understanding the exciting and complex social structure that surrounds him. It is not simply a new role theory, but a new theory that is qualitatively significant from its predecessors. With proper  understanding, it should please the Freudians as well as the Gestaltists – the non-metrically and the metrically oriented. It offers us a significantly new perspective of ‘old’ phenomena, and it generates new insights of its own. It would be a misnomer to call it a new role theory; it simply is a new theory that is strongly rooted in and preserves well the phenomenology of people and the structure of life events.

Donald L. Mosher, Ph.D.

I am pleased to share in the excitement of new endeavors – the Formal Theory of Behavior and the Conflict Analysis Battery. As a psychologist interested in personality theory and measurement, I feel a particular intellectual excitement when I discover a unique and creative new theory of personality that has generated its own set of operations for its major constructs.

As I sat reading the Formal Theory of Behavior, my excitement was piqued-in the sense of stimulated, not in the sense of offended. Stimulated because its author, Albert J. Levis, M.D., had an unusual breadth and depth of knowledge of both the arts and sciences that he was putting to such creative use. I was fascinated by his cyclical theory of six oscillating phases of interpersonal roles derived from his analysis of Greek cosmogony. Beginning from art, he delved deeply into mathematics and science to adapt a model used to describe simple harmonic motion of a pendulum to blocked energy in motivational forces that are proportional and opposite to displacements from their resting state. The theory of mathematical groups and sinusoidal curves of trigonometric variations of variables through time provided unusual elegance and rigor in this adapted model. The Formal Theory of Behavior is an elegant theory seeking to integrate the structural work of Piaget and Levi-Strauss with the dynamic thought of theorists like Freud.

From the solid grounding in a model from physics, Levis ascended skyward to literary and visual symbols to transform his mathematical equations of physics into measurable psychological variables using the symbolic productions of clients. Levis is as comfortable using the artwork of Henry Gorski to illustrate his Formal Theory as he is using the projective protocols derived from his Conflict Analysis Battery. The battery is, in itself, a major original contribution to personality assessment of conflict. Based upon both a set of somewhat standard projectives and inventories and a lengthy series of innovative symbol projective tests, it permits a thorough investigation of conflict both by the client and therapist. A particularly novel and well-done element is the set of process questions included in the procedure. It fosters self-insight and transforms the test-taking process into a learning process of self-discovery.

A lengthy manual for formally interpreting the Conflict Analysis Battery designates 10 different levels of interpretation that are tightly integrated with the Formal Theory. It is this specification of a set of operations and functional relationships between the variables within formal theory that marks Levis’ work as state-of-the-art in the state-of-the-science.

My best bet is that Dr. Levis’ Formal Theory and Conflict Analysis Battery will speed my quest for personal insight and the scientific quest for understanding the interpersonal conflicts and resolutions that mark the episodes in our lives.