Introduction to Panel: When Relatedness is Damaged or Undeveloped: A New Consideration of the Link between Relational Psychoanalysis and the Object Relations Tradition

Abstract

In this panel, we introduce two new conceptualizations of the analyst’s role and function designed for work with patients outside the reach of customary modes of engagement. Our approaches to the challenges of such patients draw on the insights of object relations theorists but rely on the relational school’s emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity and differing forms of engagement. We believe that together our approaches contribute to a broadened bandwidth of relational practice.

Across the field, there has been a swell of interest in object relations lately, seen in American attention to the work of Bion, contemporary Kleinians and Independents, in European and South American inroads into field theory, and other trends.

We believe it is a pivotal time in relational psychoanalysis itself. In its first decades, the relational school fundamentally altered the psychoanalytic model by making the instrument of change the therapeutic dyad, grounded in the analyst’s subjectivity and the patient’s co-creative authority. As influential as these and other core concepts have been, we believe they rested, to an extent, on an assumption of some verbal expressiveness and reflective awareness in patients.

Yet the kinds of people who increasingly seek our help are patients whose suffering or difficulties are not communicable by language, or have not attained sufficient representational status to be experienced as mental phenomena. We speak of patients who were subjected to profound, early damage or environments of neglect, so that they contend with violent inner lives and states of turbulence, or more abandoned inner worlds and states of isolation. Such conditions disturb or constrain relatedness such that customary modes of intersubjective engagement are not useful. Stated in other terms, we feel that the main relational reworking of the analytic model did not take into sufficient consideration patients who suffer from severe disturbance, marked developmental challenge due to neglect, or various primitive¹ phenomena.

We explore new ways to engage the particularity and uniqueness of these patients’ inner worlds and seek other registers within which to reach these patients. We have found object relationists’ insights into such patients’ difficulties most illuminating. But it is the relational emphasis on forms of engagement and the use of the analyst’s subjectivity that have figured so importantly into our approaches.

We believe that our struggle to know and be-with these patients in these particular spaces constitutes a psychoanalytic healing itself. Finding ways of engaging in areas of concreteness, motility, and the nonsymbolized, in its way, assumes an enlarged, rather than constricted, range of analytic intersubjectivity.

In sum, we present two new perspectives on the analyst’s role and function—the analyst as catalyst and psychoanalytic companioning—that together offer a broadened and enriched bandwidth of relational practice.

Notes

¹ The term primitive is controversial because it seems to accord lesser status to some forms of experience, which are thought to endure in all of us concurrent with other organization. Seligman (2016) argued for the value of the term, if reconsidered.