ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the history and evolution of the relational perspective, its theoretical underpinnings and ancestry, and its emergence as a powerful critique and alternative to the more classical movements in psychoanalysis. In the history of psychoanalysis, the disruption and erasure of conversations about technique, or metapsychology, or theory have been costly. In Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell launched a consideration of a wide range of theories, marking what they termed a "radical alternative" to one person drive theory in the widely different work of Klein, Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut. Social construction has meant many things to relationalists, but for those working on gender and sexuality, the social was both micro and macro. In the past decade, significant developments in neuroscience offer interesting points of conversation and integration. Most researchers are creating engaged fields of inquiry to think about what develops, what is interpersonal, and how relational matrices become intrapsychic.