ABSTRACT
The most rapidly evolving theoretical orientation within psychoanalysis of the last decade of the twentieth century (and perhaps the first decade of the twenty-first) is the so-called relational or intersubjective approach. Many major figures are contributing to this orientation. Its identifying tenet is perhaps the assumption that the psychoanalytic encounter is co-constructed between two active participants with the subjectivities of both patient and analyst contributing to generate the shape and substance of the dialogue that emerges. There are a great number of brilliant major contributors more or less committed to relational/ intersubjective views, including Ogden (1994), McLaughlin (1991), Hoffman (1994), Renik (1993), and Bromberg (1998), to name just a few in this most fertile of fields (other major contributors working within this framework include Daniel Stern, Jay Greenberg, Lewis Aron, Stuart Pizer, and Stephen Mitchell). Their views are all somewhat different and a definitive intersubjective-relational view has yet to emerge. Having reviewed interpersonal approaches in the early 1980s, Merton Gill was said 124to have come to a conclusion analogous to Ghent’s witty description of a psychoanalytic political grouping that agreed to affiliate under a common designation and then avoided defining the often very different concepts that each had in mind when using a term (Mitchell 1996). Stephen Mitchell has been singled out for discussion here because the links between his views and those of attachment theory show the greatest overlap and appear most productive in their convergence.
