Introduction

“The patient needs an experience, not an explanation.” This remark, usually attributed to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (May, 1958, p. 81), is often quoted by interpersonal psychoanalysts. Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Karen Horney all broke away from the dominant Freudian thinking of their time and came to be known as the Interpersonal or Cultural School of psychoanalysis. In more recent years, Stephen Mitchell, Jay Greenberg, Philip Bromberg, Jody Davies, Lewis Aron, Donnell Stern, and many others have continued this break with Freudian analysis in what has come to be known as relational psychoanalysis. In these overlapping traditions, the relationship with the analyst and other people is considered foremost, not only the sexual and aggressive drives of the patient. The intrapsychic is considered along with the interpersonal. Drawing from the influence of Sandor Ferenczi, these analysts have questioned the idea that the analyst should be a blank screen who encourages idealization and transferential distortions. They also see the patient’s problems as stemming from problems in living and dehumanizing conditions, not only as repressed sexual urges. The self is not conceived of as a “true” and “false” self, but as a system with multiple self-with-other states. Inquiry is used so that the analyses will not be as prolonged as those involving only the patient’s free associations and the analyst’s interpretations of them. The goal is to increase “a patient’s skill in living” (Sullivan, 1953, p. 175). “Change in experience of self in relation to others – and in analytic treatment, in relation to the analyst – is the goal of Interpersonal psychoanalysis” (Mann, 1995, p. 558). There is no blueprint for this work. Kavanaugh states that there is a “willingness to be drawn in the patient’s relational field and to be with him rather than know about him as in orthodox analysis” (1995, p. 573). The problems seem more complicated than those of simple symptom reduction.