Introduction

This chapter provides an integrative view of the theory of psychoanalytic practice. It is not, however, a theory of classical technique, but of a particular approach to clinical practice: that of relational psychoanalysis. One of the graduates of its Institute, Harold Searles, who worked with E. Fromm-Reichmann in Chestnut Lodge, became a pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients in the USA and a radical explorer of the field of counter-transference, whose writings strongly resembled Sandor Ferenczi's yet-unpublished Clinical Diary. The impersonal view of the analytic interaction is a consequence of the fact that the psychoanalytic enquiry originally focused on psychopathology, and that has greater attention been paid to the study of health. J. R. Greenberg arid S. A. Mitchell identified and specified two widely diverging approaches to psychoanalysis: the drive-structure model and the relational-structure model usually referred to simply as the "relational model".