Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting. From the first contact with our patients, we begin to engage the question: who is this person who has sought out our help? How do we understand their suffering? The maverick founders of interpersonal school of psychoanalysis, originally known as the cultural school, each in his/her own way, focused on the powerful impact of culture and social systems on the psyche. This work has been most cogently extended in contemporary thought by Edgar Levenson. In the work of these practitioners and thinkers, we can see how cultural forces are transmitted through family systems and other social institutions including in the relationship between therapist and patient. Today I will introduce what I am calling the cultural interpersonal lens, a careful theorizing of the human organism evolving in multiple social systems and the forces that contribute to pathology and problems of living. I will discuss the assumptions and power of this perspective in our contemporary clinical work.