Relational Psychoanalysis and the Concepts of Truth and Meaning: Response to Jon Mills

Abstract

This response looks at Professor Mills’s paper through the concepts of truth and meaning. It argues that the meaning of every experience, including, of course, experience in the psychoanalytic encounter, is created, and should be looked upon through three dimensions: objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity, with no one of them having precedence over the others. It claims that looking at the patient’s and therapist’s experiences through these dimensions enables us to move from observing structures to observing processes, and from relating to an eternally repeated past to relating to co-created “present moment of the past.”

Keywords:

• subjectivity
• inter
• objectivity
• relational psychoanalysis
• subjectivity
• Truth.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Boaz Shalgi

Boaz Shalgi, PhD, is a clinical psychologist; a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University; Head of the Psychotherapy Program, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University; and Editor of Sihot— Israel Journal of Psychotherapy. He maintains a private practice in Hod Hasharon, Israel.