ABSTRACT
Relational psychoanalysts have been leaders internationally in the field of relational thought, broadening relational ideas to include culture, politics, transgenerational trauma, gender studies and sexuality, and extending our use of language, enabling to think about clinical 'unthought knowns'. Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant caused a mini revolution in clinical thinking. He described a baby who has a separate mind thus providing a challenge to the concept of symbiotic attachment. Humanistic theory has similarly integrated psychoanalytic thinking. In a recent online Colloquium of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), based upon Hoffman's paper 'Therapeutic Passion in the Countertransference', Steven Cooper argued that relational theory is a meta-theory 'because it is not a theory of technique or metapsychology'. The term relational can also be understood as a symbol of the type of sensibility associated with the therapeutic task.
