ABSTRACT
Relational psychoanalytic practices reflect much of what Luise Eichenbaum and were writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s about one's work with women at the Women's Therapy Centre. Therapeutic neutrality and therapeutic stance are therefore reconceptualized, as are other issues that could be considered contentious, such as the blank screen, self-disclosure, the analyst's use of the countertransference, interpretation, power in the therapy relationship, dependency and money. The understandings of relational analysis start from the premise that the individual is born into a set of social and psychological circumstances. Therapeutic neutrality has been idealized and fetishized. The idealization is a function of the distance the therapist wishes to take from the patient. It is an expression of the desire not to be influenced or be affected because it was thought that the analyst was a kind of psychic detective or surgeon. Dependency and recognition, of course, have enormous implications for our institutional, class and gender arrangements.
