ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the influential relational formulations regarding the relationship between understanding and relational engagement in therapeutic action and transformation. It discusses the recent trend in analytic theory, influenced by mother-infant research, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, privileging the role of 'implicit' relational processes over 'explicit', interpretive communications in therapeutic action and illustrates some 'ordinary' clinical examples. Understanding and relational engagement are viewed as inseparable and as operating synergistically. The focus on speech as action, on the embodiment and intersubjectivity of speaking and listening, is at the heart of relational ideas. In Sander's language, achieving progressive fittedness in the service of either a child's or patient's psychological growth requires both specificity of recognition and specificity of connection. Some contemporary 'Bionian field theorists', comparing their approach with contemporary Relational theory, privilege the analytic field over the real analytic relationship itself as the primary system of interest, and source of analytic data.
