ABSTRACT
Relational ethics are concerned with an ethics of care, in this case the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist, and, as such, are useful in qualitative research and research in any area of intimacy e.g. in palliative care, as well as close professional and/or personal relationships. In developments which overlap with this convergence in psychoanalytic thinking and which also draw explicitly on other, humanistic sources, there has been a resurgence of interest in the relational in other approaches to psychotherapy and counselling: in dialogical psychotherapy, gestalt therapy, transactional analysis. Orbach argues that 'Relational psychoanalysis has a democratic, co-created view of the therapeutic relationship'. She also picks up the politics of the relational and focuses explicitly on the personal and social/political nature of the relational in psychotherapy. The purpose of a commentary is to offer some treatise on the text, an exposition of principles or a drawing out and summary of themes, commonalities and differences.
