ABSTRACT
Rather than being a comprehensive theoretical school, relational psychoanalysis provides a framework or set of sensibilities that highlights the centrality of relationships in the human psyche. A psychoanalyst drawing on these principles actively reflects on relational dynamics between self and other that play out both within a person’s internal experience (intrapsychically) and external/environmental experience (interpersonally) in order to best understand and help patients.
The emergence of relational psychoanalysis allowed for the articulation of broader ways of understanding patients’ minds and lives and the nuances of the therapeutic relationship. It grew out of a spirit of needing to break down authoritarian structures and to move closer to the range of meanings that might unfold as the therapist and patient are immersed together in processes of relating.
This chapter provides some initial background of the relational movement followed by some important clinical ideas utilized by relational psychoanalysts in practice including: a “two-person psychology”, intersubjectivity, multiplicity of self and the analyst’s use of self. It concludes by discussing some limitations of relational psychoanalysis and ways that recurring patterns of emphasis and de-emphasis within this approach may place relational clinicians at risk for certain clinical difficulties or blind spots.
