Relational Psychoanalysis
Mind is constituted in relationship rather than in the individual, the analyst’s subjectivity is unavoidably part of the field, and change occurs through the negotiation of enactments in which both parties are implicated rather than through interpretation delivered from outside.
There are two people in the room, and neither of them is objective.
Who built it
Stephen A. Mitchell
1946–2000Analyst, New York
With Jay Greenberg, mapped the drive/relational divide in 1983 and named the relational turn. The tradition’s principal architect.
RelationalJessica Benjamin
Analyst and theorist
Intersubjectivity and recognition: the developmental achievement of recognising the other as a separate centre of experience, and the analysis of domination and submission that follows its failure.
Relational / feministLewis Aron
1952–2019Analyst
The mutual but asymmetrical relationship; systematic treatment of analyst self-disclosure and of the analyst’s subjectivity as a technical question.
RelationalPhilip Bromberg
1931–2020Analyst
Multiple self-states and dissociation as normal rather than pathological; "standing in the spaces" between self-states.
Relational
Theory of personality
The relational turn is best understood as the collapse of the one-person model. Classical analysis assumed an observer analysing an observed mind. Relational analysis holds that there is no position outside the field: the analyst’s presence, personality, gender, race, class and blind spots shape what appears, and pretending otherwise is itself an intervention with consequences.
Multiple self-states
Bromberg’s reframing: the unitary self is an illusion maintained by ordinary dissociation. We are all multiple, and health is not integration into one self but the capacity to move between self-states while remaining recognisably oneself — "standing in the spaces". Trauma is what happens when the spaces close and states become walled off.
Recognition
Benjamin’s account: the developmental achievement is recognising the other as a separate subject rather than as an object of one’s own need — and being so recognised. Where recognition fails, relationships collapse into complementarity: doer and done-to, dominant and submissive. Much of what appears as sadomasochistic dynamics is failed recognition.
Theory of psychopathology
Pathology is relational configurations that cannot be renegotiated. The person is stuck in a limited repertoire of ways of being with others, each of which forecloses the recognition that would allow something new. Dissociation between self-states prevents the person from having access to their whole repertoire at once.
Theory of change
- 1Enactments occur — jointly created episodes in which analyst and patient live out a configuration before either can think about it. They are inevitable, not errors.
- 2The analyst becomes aware of being inside one, usually late, and frequently through their own discomfort.
- 3The enactment is named, with the analyst’s contribution owned rather than attributed entirely to the patient.
- 4Negotiation follows: what happened, what each brought, what it means. Neither party has the authoritative account.
- 5A new relational possibility is created in the negotiation itself, which is what generalises.
Key concepts
The vocabulary you need to read the literature and to be understood in supervision.
Where it sits in the transtheoretical grid
Which change processes the system leans on, and at what level of content it aims.
- Helping relationship
Being open and trusting about problems with someone who cares; the relationship as vehicle, and as medicine in its own right.
- Consciousness raising
Increasing information about oneself and the problem - feedback, interpretation, education, observation.
- Catharsis / dramatic relief
Experiencing and expressing affect about the problem, whether by corrective emotional experience or by evoking what has been avoided.
- Self-reevaluation
Appraising how one thinks and feels about oneself with respect to the problem; values clarification.
- Current interpersonal conflicts
- Intrapersonal conflicts