Debating Relational Psychoanalysis

In Debating Relational Psychoanalysis, Jon Mills provides an historical record of the debates that had taken place for nearly two decades on his critique of the relational school, including responses from his critics. Since he initiated his critique, relational psychoanalysis has become an international phenomenon with proponents worldwide. This book hopes that further dialogue may not only lead to conciliation, but more optimistically, that relational theory may be inspired to improve upon its theoretical edifice, both conceptually and clinically, as well as develop technical parameters to praxis that help guide and train new clinicians to sharpen their own theoretical orientation and therapeutic efficacy. Because of the public exchanges in writing and at professional symposiums, these debates have historical significance in the development of the psychoanalytic movement as a whole simply due to their contentiousness and proclivity to question cherished assumptions, both old and new. In presenting this collection of his work, and those responses of his critics, Mills argues that psychoanalysis may only advance through critique and creative refinement, and this requires a deconstructive praxis within the relational school itself. Debating Relational Psychoanalysis will be of interest to psychoanalysts of all orientations, psychotherapists, mental health workers, psychoanalytic historians, philosophical psychologists, and the broad disciplines of humanistic, phenomenological, existential, and analytical psychology.

Is therapy’s relational turn only something to celebrate? It is a major worldwide trend taking place in all the therapy traditions. But up to now appreciation of these developments has not been twinned with well-informed and constructive critique. Hence practitioners and students have not been able to engage as fully as they might with the complex questions and issues that relational working presents. Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Appraisals and reappraisals seeks to redress this balance. In this unique book, Del Loewenthal and Andrew Samuels bring together the contributions of writers from several countries and many therapy modalities, all of whom have engaged with what ‘relational’ means – whether to espouse the idea, to urge caution or to engage in sceptical reflection. Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Appraisals and reappraisals presents clinical work of the highest standard in a way that is moving and draws the reader in. The more intellectual contributions are accessible and respectful, avoiding the polarising tendencies of the profession. At a time when there has been a decline in the provision and standing of the depth therapies across the globe, this book shows that, whatever the criticisms, there is still creative energy in the field. It is hoped that practitioners and students in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy counselling and counselling psychology will welcome this book for its cutting edge content and compassionate tone.

Relational psychoanalysis has revivified psychoanalytic discourse by attesting to the analyst's multidimensional subjectivity and then showing how this subjectivity opens to deeper insights about the experience of analysis. Volume 3 of the Relational Psychoanalysis Book Series enlarges this ongoing project in significant ways. Here, leading relational theorists explore the cultural, racial, class-conscious, gendered, and even traumatized anlagen of the self as pathways to clinical understanding. Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices is especially a forum for new relational voices and new idioms of relational discourse. Established writers, Muriel Dimen, Sue Grand, and Ruth Stein among them, utilize aspects of their own subjectivity to illuminate heretofore neglected dimensions of cultural experience, of trauma, and of clinical stalemate. A host of new voices applies relational thinking to aspects of race, class, and politics as they emerge in the clinical situation. The contributors to Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices are boldly unconventional – in their topics, in their modes of discourse, and in their innovative and often courageous uses of self. Collectively, they convey the ever widening scope of the relational sensibility. The "relational turn" keeps turning.

The "relational turn" has transformed the field of psychoanalysis, with an impact that cuts across different schools of thought and clinical modalities. In the six years following publication of Volume 1, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition, relational theorizing has continued to develop, expand, and challenge the parameters of clinical discourse. It has been a period of loss, with the passing of Stephen A. Mitchell and Emmanuel Ghent, but also a period of great promise, marked by the burgeoning publication of relational books and journals and the launching of relational training institutes and professional associations. Volume 2, Relational Psychoanalysis: Innovation and Expansion, brings together key papers of the recent past that exemplify the continuing growth and refinement of the relational sensibility. In selecting these papers, Editors Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris have stressed the shared relational dimension of different psychoanalytic traditions, and they have used such commonalities to structure the best recent contributions to the literature. The topics covered in Volume 2 reflect both the evolution of psychoanalysis and the unique pathways that leading relational writers have been pursuing and in some cases establishing.

This book closely examines the analyst’s early experiences and character traits, demonstrating the impact they have on theory building and technique. Arguing that choice of theory and interventions are unconsciously shaped by clinicians’ early experiences, this book argues for greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and open dialogue as a corrective. Linking the analyst’s early childhood experiences to ongoing vulnerabilities reflected in theory and practice, this book favors an approach that focuses on feedback and confrontation, as well as empathic understanding and acceptance. Essential to this task, and a thesis that runs through the book, are analysts’ motivations for doing treatment and the gratifications they naturally seek. Maroda asserts that an enduring blind spot arises from clinicians’ ongoing need to deny what they are personally seeking from the analytic process, including the need to rescue and be rescued. She equally seeks to remove the guilt and shame associated with these motivations, encouraging clinicians to embrace both their own humanity and their patients’, rather than seeking to transcend them. Providing a new perspective on how analysts work, this book explores the topics of enactment, mirror neurons, and therapeutic action through the lens of the analyst’s early experiences and resulting personality structure. Maroda confronts the analyst’s tendencies to favor harmony over conflict, passivity over active interventions, and viewing the patient as an infant rather than an adult. Exploring heretofore unexamined issues of the psychology of the analyst or therapist offers the opportunity to generate new theoretical and technical perspectives. As such, this book will be invaluable to experienced psychodynamic therapists and students and trainees alike, as well as teachers of theory and practice.

Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Integration traces the history of efforts to integrate psychoanalysis with other psychotherapeutic modalities, beginning with the early analysts, including Ferenczi and Rank, and continuing on to the present day. It explores the potential for integration made possible by contemporary developments in theory and technique that are fundamental to a relational psychoanalytic approach. Editors Jill Bresler and Karen Starr bring together an array of valuable theoretical and clinical contributions by relationally oriented psychoanalysts who identify their work as integrative. The book is organized in four segments: theoretical frameworks of psychotherapy integration; integrating multiple models of psychotherapy into a psychoanalytically informed treatment; working with specific populations; the future of integration, exploring the issues involved in educating clinicians in integrative practice. The contributions in this volume demonstrate that integrating techniques from a variety of psychotherapies outside of psychoanalysis can enrich and enhance psychoanalytic practice. It will be an invaluable resource for all practicing psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in training, particularly those with an interest in relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy integration.

Includes a foreword by Nancy McWilliams In Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality, Neil J. Skolnick takes us on a journey that traces his personal evolution from a graduate student through to his career as a relational psychoanalyst. Skolnick uniquely shares his publications and presentations that span his professional career, weaving in issues around temporality and relational psychoanalysis. Accessible and deeply thought-provoking, this book explores the many ways our lives are pervaded and shaped by time, and how it infuses the problems that psychoanalysts work with in the consulting room. Skolnick begins each chapter with an introduction, contextualizing the papers in his own evolution as a relational analyst as well as in the broader evolution of the relational conceit in the psychoanalytic field. Following an incisive description of the realities and mysteries of time, he highlights how psychoanalysts have applied several temporal phenomena to the psychoanalytic process. The papers and presentations address an assortment of time-worn psychoanalytic issues as they have become redefined, reconfigured and re-contextualized by the application of a relational psychoanalytic perspective. It purports to chart the changes in the field and the author’s practice as, like many psychoanalysts, Skolnick explains his shifted perspective from classical to ego psychological, to relational psychoanalysis across the trajectory of his career. Finally, the author struggles to understand the contributions of time to the process of change in psychoanalytic thought and practice. This book also provides a fascinating guide to how our lives are contextualized in the invisibilities of time, illuminating the most frequent ways time influences psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality will be of immense interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and therapists of all persuasions in their practice and training. It should also be of interest to philosophers, historians and scholars of psychoanalysis who have a general interest in studying the role of psychoanalysis in influencing contemporary trends of Western thought.

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, Relational Psychoanalysis continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, Volume 5 carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at the progress in therapeutic process. Included here are chapters on transference and countertransference, engagement, dissociation and self-states, analytic impasses, privacy and disclosure, enactments, improvisation, development, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Lewis Aron, Anthony Bass, Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Steven Cooper, Jody Messler Davies, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dianne Elise, Glen Gabbard, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Steven Knoblauch, Thomas Ogden, Spyros Orfanos, Stuart Pizer, Philip Ringstrom, Jill Salberg, Stephen Seligman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Paul Wachtel.