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.