We Are All Relational, but Are Some More Relational Than Others?

Abstract

This article discusses Ray Little’s (2013) integration of humanistic transactional analysis with both traditional and relational psychoanalysis from the vantage point of a wider, broad-spectrum integrative perspective, with particular emphasis on TA’s sister tradition of body psychotherapy. The growing consensus across diverse therapeutic approaches regarding the developmental origins of relational patterns is acknowledged. The problems, inconsistencies, and contradictions within the integrative project are discussed, with particular reference to the origins of humanistic psychology during the 1960s and their partially reactive differentiation against psychoanalysis, which leaves today’s practitioners with unresolved legacies in the form of fixed assumptions regarding both theory and practice as well as key concepts such as ego and working alliance. Taking the key notion of the therapist’s equidistant position between the needed and repeated relationship as its starting point, the author suggests that enactment is the central notion of relationality. A multiplicity of diverse therapeutic kinds of relatedness is affirmed as valid, and different notions of the relational and inconsistencies and ambivalences in integrative formulations are addressed. The aim is to reach a more solid, robust integration that is grounded in a bodymind understanding of enactment as the paradoxical essence of therapeutic action.