Relational Psychoanalysis Research Articles

It Takes Two to Know One: Mutual Relations at the Heart of Therapeutic Action

ABSTRACT In this essay, I reflect on the origins of relational psychoanalysis during my training years at the NYU Postdoctoral Program between 1983 and 1989, and the subsequent evolution of my own psychoanalytic credo in which I place the essential mutuality of the psychoanalytic process at the heart of the therapeutic action that it generates. I explore the idea that all analysis is at heart a form of mutual analysis in which personal transformation and healing is inevitably bi-directional.

Grandmaternal Subjectivity: A Conversation with Jessica Benjamin

In this conversational interview with Jessica Benjamin, who herself is a grandmother of feminist and relational psychoanalysis, we explore the scopic field of grandmaternal subjectivity. Starting with Benjamin’s recognition theory and thirdness, we consider how interrelated these positions are with maternal subjectivity, and then expand out to other layers of recognition by and of grandmothers, emphasizing where the grandmaternal can foster a sense of innate goodness in the mother through recognition. Benjamin is clear to not exclude fathers or grandfathers in her recognition of multiple subjectivities. She also considers the ways in which generational distance and age play a role in emotional regulation around young children, and broader social issues pertaining to recognition. We conclude with a consideration of lineage and relating through differentiation on both a personal and professional register.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Maternal Subjectivity: An Essential Link in Relational-Social Psychoanalysis

This article begins with an overview of the historical treatment of maternal subjectivity within psychology, psychoanalysis, and feminism, discussing the inroads that have been made to support the subject status of mothers themselves, as well as where these improvements are incomplete. Also considered are the invited papers appearing in this special issue of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and the ways in which they unfold new iterations of theorizing maternal subjectivity. Particularly, this paper introduces the concept of matrescence—the developmental process of becoming a mother—into the psychoanalytic lexicon. Doing so allows further discussion of how the mother’s subject status can elaborate the lineage of the feminine and co-created, relational, and social aspects of identity. Recognizing the mother is not an individualistic pursuit, a competition between mother and baby for whose experience gets to matter; rather, recognizing maternal subjectivity is inherently a recognition of linking. It is essential to the development of relational psychoanalysis and, this paper argues, an essential link in considering the oft-neglected socio-cultural aspects of the psyche.

A relational psychoanalysis: The real presence of the analyst

A relational psychoanalysis: The real presence of the analyst

Françoise Dolto Between Relational Thinking and Freudian Metapsychology

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to present the work of the French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) and to explore possible contributions to current debates in relational psychoanalysis. We present the historical and conceptual relationship between relational psychoanalysis and French psychoanalysis. Within this context, we will discuss certain key concepts (e.g., unconscious body image, need and desire, symbolic castrations) of Dolto who, in our view, provides an intersubjective understanding of the unconscious that resembles current relational approaches such as Jessica Benjamin’s theory of recognition. We shall discuss Dolto’s embodied understanding of the unconscious and the role of language and intercorporeal resonance and will compare it to Benjamin’s relational approach.

An Epistolary Conversation.

This written exchange is between a senior and a younger Jungian analyst on issues relevant to the development of analytical psychology throughout the world today. The younger analyst, Stefano Carpani, considers himself a neo-Jungian. He explains to John Beebe, known for post-Jungian contributions to the study of typology, integrity, and gender, how important it is to include sociological perspectives alongside those that stem from the Jungian practice of relational psychoanalysis. The degree to which analysis has become an extended meditation on the relation of individual self-exploration to supra-personal Self-realization is emphasized by both authors, who envision this introspection leading to an expanded inner openness that Carpani has called "absolute freedom." The authors conclude that absolute freedom is a space of engaged reflection that can permit an informed but individualized approach to the complexities of the world soul today.

Harry Stack Sullivan and Stephen Mitchell in Italy – A historical and a personal account

Having introduced readers to the history of the reception of psychoanalysis in Italy, the author reconstructs the history of the Italian reception of the work of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) and Stephen A. Mitchell (1946–2000). Sullivan’s work played a fundamental role in adding to the “new Italian psychiatry,” founded by Franco Basaglia (1824–1980), the psychodynamic dimension it lacked, creating a new convergence between the social and psychological dimensions of psychiatry. Mitchell’s work played a fundamental role in the development of the Italian tradition of psychoanalytic psychotherapy originally articulated by Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013) and Pier Francesco Galli, following their reception of Sullivan’s work. This phenomenon coincided, from an institutional point of view, with the emergence of a network of Italian institutes and societies affiliated to the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, which had been originally cofounded by the William Alanson White Institute – the institute founded by Sullivan in 1943, where Mitchell himself trained as a psychoanalyst at the end of the 1970s. Interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis also ended up finding a place in the work of several colleagues of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, as well as allowing the foundation of several institutes and societies affiliated to the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. The author reconstructs this chapter of Italian psychoanalysis from both a historiographical and a personal point of view.

The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy By Steven Kuchuck. Confer Books, 2021. 198 pp.

The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy By Steven Kuchuck. Confer Books, 2021. 198 pp.Robin YoungRobin YoungRobin Young, PhD, is a senior member, training analyst, and instructor at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP); an assistant adjunct lecturer at New York University (NYU); and founder of an international Loewald reading group. Young has published research on the revised psychoanalytic theories of female development; studied the mother/infant dyad under Lousie Kaplan at NYU; made international and national psychoanalytic presentations; and undertaken private studies with Lew Aron and Jessica Benjamin. She is a member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and has had a private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy since 1980.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:June 2023https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.2023.110.2.229PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesAron L. (2006). Analytic impasse and the third: Clinical implications of intersubjectivity theory. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 87, 349–368. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarBalsam R. H. (2008). The essence of Hans Loewald. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 56, 1117–1128. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarBenjamin J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarFerenczi S. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 225–230. Google ScholarFreud S. (1912). Recommendations to physicians practicing psycho-analysis. In Strachey J. (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 109–120). London: Hogarth Press, 1957–1974. Google ScholarKuhn T. (1949). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google ScholarLoewald H. (1951). Ego and reality. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 32, 10–18. Google ScholarMaroda K. J. (2005). Legitimate gratification of the analysts’ needs. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 41, 371–388. Crossref, Google ScholarRenik O. (1999). Playing one's cards face up in analysis: An approach to the problem of self-disclosure. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 68(4), 521–539. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.1999.tb00546.x Crossref Medline, Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 110Issue 2Jun 2023 Information© 2023 N.P.A.P.PDF download

Transforming Trauma through an Arts Festival: A Psychosocial Case Study

Through a psychosocial lens, informed by relational psychoanalysis, this article discusses the design, delivery, and impact of The Big Anxiety’s 2022 festival in Warwick, Queensland—an arts-based program that engages with lived experiences of trauma, distress, and suicide, and in this case with the devastating impact of youth suicide, disproportionately affecting First Nations communities. It describes the festival’s methods of creative engagement, examining how these create conditions for the transformation of trauma and for experiences of growth.

International Gestalt Training Workshop and Conference

International Gestalt Training Workshop and Conference

Developing a prototype for relationship therapy psychoanalysis: an empirical study with the Psychotherapy Process Q-set.

Psychotherapy Process Q-set (PQS) prototype characteristic of psychoanalytic relationship therapy does not yet exist. Experts in psychoanalysis of relationship therapy [from the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis of the Relationship (SIPRe)] used the 100-Item PQS questionnaire to rate an ideal SIPRe therapy. Agreement between rates was high (Cronbach's alpha=0.84). The prototype for SIPRe therapy showed a significant correlation to the psychoanalytic prototype (r=0.68, p<0.000) and to the short expressive-supportive therapy (r=0.69, p<0.000) prototype. Correlations with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (r=0.28, p<0.005) and Interpersonal Therapy (r=0.22, p<0.031), prototypes were significant, but weaker. The correlation between the two SIPRe samples (junior and expert therapists) was highly significant (Spearman's rho=0.936; p<000).

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality ed. by Max Belkin and Cleonie White

Reviewed by: Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality ed. by Max Belkin and Cleonie White Deborah Shilkoff, LICSW (bio) Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, Edited by Max Belkin and Cleonie White Psychoanalytic metapsychology has changed in the past decades from an emphasis on drives as the source of intrapsychic organization, energy, and movement. The nexus of psychoanalytic theory has evolved from the intrapsychic to an interpersonal, intersubjective, and relational focus. With the evolution of intersubjective psychoanalysis, the bi-personal field of the analytic pair is now seen as the vehicle of intrapsychic growth. The relational field further evolved as the locus for development of the ego. An appreciation of the social milieu and its effect on the individual led to an understanding of the long arm of trauma on development. Relational psychoanalysis holds that one sequela of trauma is dissociation, the inability to hold overwhelming pain that threatens the ego with fragmentation. The individual's internal states are cut off from one another, disabling the ego from cohering. Self-states are not perceived as belonging to the individual but are felt to be "not me" states. Internal conflict cannot be accessed because it did not fully develop or because it was sidelined by overwhelming trauma. Affect regulation and thought are not available to stem the flow of traumatic fight/flight/freeze enactment. Philip Bromberg's "Credo" (2012) tells us that "the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is a self–Other negotiation that takes place between and within analyst and patient at the interface of dissociation and the capacity to hold internal conflict" (p. 273). Bromberg counseled achieving a balance of "safety and risk" within the therapeutic alliance as the most effective analytic tool. Enactments are processed jointly with the goal of developing the capacity for thought and affect tolerance. [End Page 207] Complexity becomes available, and the world is no longer seen as monolithic and annihilating. Kimberlé Crenshaw (2016, 1991) is the originator of the term "intersectionality," which is a way to name and frame the complexity at the intersection of racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, ableism, xenophobia, and heterosexism. Without such a "frame," Crenshaw tells us, we lack an awareness, context, and empathy for the various states experienced by those in these overlapping categories. Not being able to see more than one part of the overlapping frame at a time results in deficits in or assaults on social justice. Crenshaw gives the example of Emma DeGraffenreid, an African American woman who was denied a job at General Motors. She sued GM for race and gender discrimination. The judge denied her claim, saying that GM did hire Blacks and women, so there was no discrimination, and he could not grant her preferential treatment. Crenshaw saw that the judge missed a key point. The Blacks hired by GM were all men who worked on the assembly line. The women, all white, were secretaries. GM had not hired Black women, a blind spot for both GM and the judge. Crenshaw saw this as an intersection in which Ms. DeGraffenreid was unacknowledged. The overlap with intersectionality and relational psychoanalysis is represented in the ability to see people and institutions as complex, with overlapping meanings. The contributors in this well-written book help us see how our unconscious sense of privilege limits our ability to see the intersecting vertices of our patients' realities. We then become part of the social structure from which patients may feel excluded. The revolutionary changes in both relational psychoanalysis and intersectionality, as outlined in this book, constitute both the ability to see complex structures as internal and external, and the function of bearing witness to trauma at many levels simultaneously. Each chapter represents a different focus, so each will be addressed separately. In "Queer Identities," Max Belkin says each category is a metaphor, not a binary stereotype that inhabits a transitional space. Our narrative is both "social" and "idiosyncratic." With his patient, Ana, both were in a "dissociative cocoon" of mutual hiding of their true selves from the other in a "fascinating but [End Page 208] disturbing hall of mirrors," competing with one another for the moral high ground of...

Introduction to special issue: Contemporary writing on transgender and relational psychoanalysis

Introduction to special issue: Contemporary writing on transgender and relational psychoanalysis

Полемика о структуре психоаналитического поля: ответ Габриэлю Тупинамба

This article develops the discussion initiated by the Gabriel Tupinambá’s Desire of Psychoanalysis, which needs to be supplemented by a clarification and revision of the attitude established in Lacanist discourse towards other disciplines and domains — first of all, science and politics. The position of psychoanalysis in relation to them appears to the author to be problematic and inconsistent with the theoretical level of psychoanalysis itself. In other words, in the interaction with other areas, the analysis feels much less confident than in the clinic and in working with its own concepts. The author hypothesizes why, among other disciplines, psychoanalysis invariably finds itself in this position. Following Tupinamba, it is argued that the main causal factor is the specific topology of the unconscious, which was established by Sigmund Freud and further developed by Jacques Lacan. In the clinic, in conversation with the general public, in dialogue with other disciplines, in each of these dimensions of psychoanalysis’s existence this topology is triggered and generates its effects, for which psychoanalysis eventually has to pay the price in its own territory. The inherent form of the axiomatic topology gives psychoanalysis certain advantages, but today it is time to state that psychoanalysis can no longer exploit its resources and must radically reconsider it and the long-term strategic problems related to it. The positions from which this revision is tentatively proposed are intended to mark and interpret the current crisis of the psychoanalytic community.

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Epistemología relacional y psicoanálisis. Principales supuestos

The idea that our mind is isolated in an inner space, "inside our heads," is deeply rooted in our culture. From the relational perspective in psychoanalysis we maintain, instead, that the mind is not something innate or internal, but is a product of human interaction, within a particular way of life. The metaphysical counterpart of the egocentric perspective is the problem of other minds – how can I be sure of the existence of minds other than my own? We should urgently review the concept of "internal representation", and its derivatives, such as the "internal object", probably also that of "object of the self", internalization and many others. Relational psychoanalysis, within the great variety of existing proposals, puts the origin of the psyche in the group, starting with the family group, departs from the energetic metapsychology but does not accept an exclusively hermeneutic version, but pays special attention to the evolutionary trauma and the attributions and family myths at the origin of the pathology.

A Last Interview with Lewis Aron: Recorded in June 2018, New York City

In June, 2018, along with several of her colleagues from Chile, Barbara Ortuzar sat down for an interview with Lewis (Lew) Aron at the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) conference in New York City. What follows is a transcribed account of that lively discussion. Following the interview, Steven Kuchuck was asked by Ortuzar and her colleagues to help with this project, particularly with regard to the translation, writing, and certain theoretical and biographical questions that arose in reviewing the recording and transcription. As it turned out, this would be the last conference that Lew would be able to attend, and as far as we know, the last interview he could grant. Lew’s long battle with cancer came to an end just 8 months after the conversation that follows below.

Conversation during 2021 between Donnel B. Stern and Luis H. Ripoll

ABSTRACT Donnel Stern and I met in the spring of 2016, when I was a fourth year candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He had begun teaching a new course there in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. I soon became fascinated with the contrast between the relational perspective and the classical one; the latter was more familiar to me from my education and training. In the years since, Don served as discussant in a clinical case presentation, and I have participated in a weekly study group he leads. More importantly, he functioned as one of several, crucial interlocutors that helped shape my development as a psychoanalyst. I came to understand his perspective further through an in-depth, critical study and consideration of his own work, mine, and that of others and came to count on him as a friend and colleague. What follows is a rather wide-ranging discussion between Don and me about his views and experiences as a psychoanalyst. It begins with an exploration of aspects of his life that affected his outlook on the profession of psychoanalysis, and then moves into a discussion about the nature of the practice itself. In the process, I expressed my own related but somewhat distinct views. Our conversation ventured freely into the meaning of each of our own experiences as psychoanalysts, with the hope that this may be of interest in thinking about psychoanalysis more generally. No part of the discussion is prescriptive regarding what psychoanalysis or a psychoanalyst should be. Our hope is that the interview provides an important articulation of Don’s unique theoretical perspective, but in a fashion that remains approachable. What follows is simply a discussion between two people from different backgrounds who found a way to explore a variety of significant ideas with one another.

A Conversation between Lewis “Lew” Aron (1952–2019) and Steven Kuchuck

ABSTRACT What follows is an edited transcription of a filmed interview that was originally commissioned by the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) for their Relational Voices Project. The video is available for viewing by IARPP members. The interview appears here by permission of IARPP. My memory for the details of how we invited Lew is foggy, and quite frankly, I didn’t have the heart to go back through my e-mails with him in order to refresh my memory. I do know that I was President-elect of IARPP at the time the idea was conceived by us on the Board’s Executive Committee. Past (and now once again, current) President Susi Nebbiosi had started this video archive sometime before the decision to ask Lew. Both to my chagrin and delight, Lew asked if I would be the one to interview him. Like many, I suppose, I don’t like watching myself on video and while I’m very happy behind a podium, the same isn’t always true in front of a camera. I think that has probably changed to some degree since Covid forced us to get used to being on Zoom and often having our teaching and lectures filmed. But back then, I was anxious about the idea and postponed hiring the camera man and setting the date. Lew didn’t seem to be in a rush either. Eventually, we confessed to each other that we had both been avoiding this, each hoping to lose some weight before filming. Alas, the clock was ticking, and the winter holidays with their temptations were upon us. We finally sat down together one week after Lew’s 65th birthday, in December 2017.

Trauma and Illusion: A Conversation between Robert D. Stolorow and Peter N. Maduro

ABSTRACT Reproduced below you will find the transcript of the interview I, Peter Maduro, conducted of Robert Stolorow, on April 17, 2021, respecting the forty-plus year history and conceptual development of his theory of emotional trauma. My interview of Dr. Stolorow was the centerpiece of an international on-line program co-sponsored by the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, in West Los Angeles, CA (ICP), and Psychoanalytic Inquiry (PI). (This program is available for viewing in its entirety upon request to ICP.) Around 1996, as soon as I began my clinical psychotherapy practice as a psych-intern here in West Los Angeles, CA, I joined one of Bob Stolorow’s clinical supervision groups. Toward the end of my first case presentation to Bob in that group he asked me what transference implications I saw in my patient’s trauma-soaked emotional experience. After a brief self-conscious hesitation, I replied, “What is transference?” Over the twenty-five-plus years since that first meeting with Bob, and that first encounter with the notion of trauma transferences, I have been steeped in Bob’s elucidation of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological-contextual inquiry, including notably his phenomenological-contextual inquiry into emotional trauma, and its literature. I have also been deeply affected by him as a person. Just during this time that I have known Bob, his psychoanalytic inquiries, including his distinctive illuminations in the phenomenology and contextuality of trauma that are the focus of my below interview, have borne the fruit of 5 books. 1 Each of these works is richly interdisciplinary at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. I hold myself quite privileged to have been at a place and time – namely, West Los Angeles from the mid-1990ʹs to the present – in which Bob’s progressive contributions to psychoanalytic understandings of trauma washed over me implicitly and explicitly as a person. They washed over me as a young boy who lost his father within a family system of denial, as Stolorow psychotherapy patient, as eager psychotherapist-in-development, as ICP psychoanalytic candidate and Stolorow supervisee, and as scholar of relational psychoanalysis, particularly of Bob’s and his collaborators’ intersubjective-systems framework. Additionally, over the last few years of the coronavirus pandemic, socio-political unrest, and climate change we have all been thrown more forcefully into seeing and feeling our own and our planet earth’s vulnerabilities. In this context, I have benefited personally, clinically, and as a citizen of our finite world from Bob’s trauma insights as he extended them from the traumatized individual to collective trauma. The interview proved remarkable in many ways. Among them, it was intellectually illuminating by virtue of Bob’s characteristically succinct, systematic articulation of his trauma thinking, and emotionally affecting by virtue of the vulnerable way Bob weaved his trauma concepts in with poignant clinical material and his own tragic losses.