ABSTRACT
Relational psychoanalysis was born out of radical critique of the authoritarian stance. Psychoanalytic practitioners take seriously the evidence that the sources of most of our behaviors, feelings, and thoughts are not conscious. Analytic thinkers regard intrapsychic conflict or multiplicity of attitude as inevitable. Sigmund Freud construed the human animal as insatiable, always yearning, never satisfied - partly because human beings often want mutually exclusive things simultaneously. Post-Freudian analysts, who focus less on drives and more on relationship, nevertheless talk about paradox, ambiguity, dialectic, multiple self-states, and the perils of reductionism. Analytic therapists from Freud on have appreciated genetic, chemical, and neurological dispositions toward the serious psychopathologies as well as historical and current stresses. Emotions may prove more consequential for human behavior than the instinctual drives privileged by Freud. Psychoanalytic therapy is not a set of technical interventions, but a body of knowledge, accumulated over years of practitioners' immersion in listening to their patients.
