ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows some of the possibilities, for both individuals and groups, of a relational understanding of identity, connection, autonomy, as well as of impasse and struggle. She presents a model for thinking about gender identity that her thought could account both for the narcissistic wounds incurred from living in a sexist culture and for the kinds of gendered experience all therapists have that make them feel good about being men or women or something in between. In 1972, Edgar Levenson wrote The Fallacy of Understanding, one thesis of which is that all concepts, including psychoanalytic ones, as does how therapists see patients and pathologies. Relational theorists are only fairly recently beginning to elaborate the theory of unconscious process that has been implicit in many of their clinical descriptions. Perhaps Levenson's most important contribution to what has now become known as relational theory was his development of a constructivist two-person vs. a one-person psychology.
