Relational Psychoanalysis and the Tragic-Existential Aspect of the Human Condition

Abstract

I suggest we may benefit by opening relational thinking to a certain aspect of a classical psychoanalytic worldview. Opening to what we can call the tragic and existential dimensions of the human condition: the universal experience of a certain inner dividedness, hiddenness, and self-deception—a strangeness within the “otherness” that constitutes ordinary, good-enough human environment; as well as the equally universal experience of impermanence—lack, inevitable loss, and finitude. Such openness entails listening to themes we hear in many critiques of relational thinking—critiques that often devolve into caricaturing relationality as avoiding the dark, internally divided side of our nature. It entails listening well enough to these universal themes in ourselves and in our patients so that we can radically reframe them—without recourse drives—in expanded, relational terms. As in Mitchell’s words, “dialectical tensions not taken as polarities … but rather as interpenetrating and, in some sense, as mutually creating each other.”

Notes

¹ There is no connection here to Kohut’s (1977) use of the term “tragic man.” His mixed model introduced a very important variant on the relational paradigm. But its emphasis on the centrality of a simple, expectable, harmonious fit between the individual and the relational environment (and the innate, future-oriented striving to activate and use that fit) are not tragic in any sense that term has been used in Western philosophical or literary thought. I hope this becomes clearer as this paper proceeds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malcolm Owen Slavin

Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D., is a founder of MIP, The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he teaches, supervises, and served several terms as President. He is also on the faculty of several other psychoanalytic institutes worldwide, the board of directors of IARPP (the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy), as well as a member of the International Council for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP). His first book (with Dan Kriegman) was The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology and the Therapeutic Process. Currently, he is preparing both a volume of his collected papers entitled Why the Analyst Needs to Change—a title drawn from his often-cited paper with that same name—and a book, Original Loss: Grieving Existential Trauma in Art, Music and Psychoanalysis.