Concept
Relational psychoanalysis
A school of psychoanalysis that took shape in the United States from the 1980s, named after the contrast Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell drew in 1983 between drive-based and relational models of the mind. It holds that mental life is built out of relations with others, real and internal, rather than out of innate drives pressing for discharge, and it brings together American interpersonal psychoanalysis and British object relations theory, later drawing on attachment theory, infancy research and feminist thought. Clinically it sees the analyst not as a neutral observer interpreting from outside but as a participant whose own subjectivity helps shape what happens between analyst and patient, so that meaning is made jointly.
Development
1983
introduced by Stephen A. Mitchell
Mitchell and Jay Greenberg first used "relational" as the name of a family of theories in their 1983 book. Mitchell then made it the name of a school: his 1988 integration, the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1990), the Relational Perspectives book series and the relational track at NYU's postdoctoral programme.
In Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983);Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (1988)
1983
introduced by Jay Greenberg
Greenberg is the co-author of the 1983 book that gave relational psychoanalysis its name. He later moved away from Mitchell's pure relational position and went back to a revised concept of drive.
In Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983)
Undated
developed by Lewis Aron
Aron built out the clinical side of relational theory. His work centred on the mutual influence of analyst and patient within an asymmetry of roles, and on the analyst's unavoidable subjectivity. He also helped build the school's institutions as founding president of the international relational association (IARPP).
In Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (1999)
Undated
developed by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin was one of the first New York analysts of the relational school and brought feminist theory and the idea of recognition into it. Mitchell and Aron reprinted her outline of intersubjectivity among the founding papers of the tradition.
In An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition (1990);Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (1999)
Relations
introduced by
- 1983 Stephen A. Mitchell
Mitchell and Jay Greenberg first used "relational" as the name of a family of theories in their 1983 book. Mitchell then made it the name of a school: his 1988 integration, the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1990), the Relational Perspectives book series and the relational track at NYU's postdoctoral programme.
- 1983 Jay Greenberg
Greenberg is the co-author of the 1983 book that gave relational psychoanalysis its name. He later moved away from Mitchell's pure relational position and went back to a revised concept of drive.
derives from
- Interpersonal psychoanalysis
The relational school grew out of the American interpersonal tradition of Sullivan, Fromm and Thompson, mostly among analysts trained at the White Institute. It took from that tradition its focus on actual interactions and the analyst's participation.
- Object relations theory
The second root of the relational school is British object relations theory, above all Fairbairn and Winnicott. From it the school took its concern with internal objects and with relations as the stuff of mind.
- Drive/structure and relational/structure models
The school takes its name and starting point from the 1983 split between drive/structure and relational/structure models. It grew from the relational side of that divide.
developed by
- Lewis Aron
Aron built out the clinical side of relational theory. His work centred on the mutual influence of analyst and patient within an asymmetry of roles, and on the analyst's unavoidable subjectivity. He also helped build the school's institutions as founding president of the international relational association (IARPP).
- Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin was one of the first New York analysts of the relational school and brought feminist theory and the idea of recognition into it. Mitchell and Aron reprinted her outline of intersubjectivity among the founding papers of the tradition.
Works
- 1983
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell's book, published by Harvard University Press in 1983, compares the major psychoanalytic theories according to one question: where each places a person's relations with others. The authors distinguish two basic models. In the drive/structure model, which descends from Freud, relations with others are generated and shaped by the need to gratify drives. In the relational/structure model, relations are primary and cannot be reduced to anything more basic. The book reads Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis and the British object relations theories of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip as radical alternatives to drive theory. It reads the ego psychology of Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson and Kernberg as a strategy of accommodation, which widens drive theory to take object relations in. Kohut and Sandler are treated as mixed-model strategies that combine elements of both. A final chapter follows the divergence between the two models into debates on diagnosis and clinical technique.
- 1988
Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration
Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration, published by Harvard University Press in 1988, is Stephen A. Mitchell's attempt to bring order to a field he saw as fragmented among competing theories. It builds on the distinction he and Jay Greenberg drew in Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory between the drive model, in which relations with others arise from and are shaped by the pursuit of drive gratification, and relational models, in which relations themselves are primary and irreducible. Mitchell argues that the drive model has outlived its usefulness, and that the relational traditions, developed piecemeal by authors who seldom recognised their shared assumptions, can be woven into one relational-conflict model: interpersonal psychoanalysis, British object relations theory, self psychology and existential psychoanalysis. In this model the mind is embedded in a relational matrix with three dimensions: the self, the other and the space between them. The book rethinks in these terms sexuality, infantilism and narcissism, the influence of early experience, the relation of past and present, the interweaving of illusion and actuality, the place of will, the repetition of painful experience, and the nature of the analytic situation and of change in analysis.
- 1990
An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition
Jessica Benjamin's 1990 paper in Psychoanalytic Psychology argues that the psychoanalytic theory of the self needs an intersubjective dimension alongside the intrapsychic one. On her account development follows two complementary lines: the internalisation of object relations, and a separate trajectory along which the child gradually becomes able to recognise the other person as a subject in their own right, with the attunement and tolerance of difference this requires. Looking at differentiation in the first two years of life, she rereads Mahler's rapprochement phase as a struggle for recognition whose outcome is not only object constancy but the beginning of the capacity to recognise another's subjectivity, and she takes up Winnicott's account of the use of an object: the other's survival of destruction is what allows them to be found as real and outside. Recognition is thus a tension between asserting oneself and acknowledging the other, which can break down into domination; and differentiation is not simple separation but a continual breakdown and repair of mutuality, a view that leaves room for fantasy and aggression in a relational theory of the self. The paper was reprinted as "Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity".
- 1999
Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition
Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (The Analytic Press, 1999) is volume 14 of the Relational Perspectives Book Series. In it, Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron collect seventeen papers that they present as the founding texts of relational psychoanalysis. The publisher's account sets the volume against a broad change in American psychoanalysis over the preceding fifteen years. In theory, the field turned from classical formulations grounded in Freud's drive theory toward models of mind and development built on object relations. In practice, it turned from the classical principles of neutrality, abstinence and anonymity toward an interactive view of the analytic situation, with the relationship and its reciprocal affective currents at the centre. The book traces these changes to a group of analysts who sought to integrate interpersonal psychoanalysis, British object relations theories and psychoanalytic feminism. They never declared themselves a school, but they produced a distinct and influential tradition of thought and clinical practice. The contributors are Eigen, Hoffman, Stern, Chodorow, Greenberg, Mitchell, Benjamin, Ghent, Aron, Davies and Frawley, Harris, Pizer, Stolorow and Atwood, Bromberg, Renik, Spezzano and Ogden. Among their subjects are the analyst's subjectivity and the patient's experience of it, recognition and intersubjectivity, unformulated experience, narcissism, masochism and surrender, dissociation in the treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, gender, paradox and the analytic third. The editors introduce each paper and place it in its historical context, and each author adds a new afterword on how their thinking has developed since. A Hebrew translation appeared in 2013.
See also
References
- Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory1983Evidence for a relation
- Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration1988Evidence for a relation
- Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition1999Evidence for a relation
- An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition1990Evidence for a relation