Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: History and Current Status

Abstract

Interpersonal psychoanalysis is not well known outside the northeastern United States, yet it has been present since the 1930s and has influenced psychoanalysis all over the world. In this article, the origins of interpersonal psychoanalysis are described, providing at least a partial explanation for this widespread ignorance. Interpersonal psychoanalysis no longer finds much of its definition by an opposition to ego psychology, as it did in its early days. Today, instead, the more significant question for interpersonal psychoanalysis is how, and whether, it can be differentiated from relational psychoanalysis. This is especially important for those who, like me, identify as both interpersonal and relational. Interpersonal thinking was the heart of Mitchell's original conception of relational psychoanalysis. I argue that interpersonal psychoanalysis remains a coherent psychoanalytic perspective, defined by radical field theory; a deemphasis on unconscious fantasy and repressed memories as templates for conscious experience; an emphasis on fantasy as mystified experience; a correspondingly greater emphasis on the embeddedness of the past in the forms of the present; and most of all, the continuous, unconscious, mutual influence of the subjectivities of analyst and patient on one another.

Keywords:

• interpersonal psychoanalysis
• relational psychoanalysis
• interpersonal field
• subjectivity
• existential
• analytic relationship

Notes

1 These quoted words, along with any other unattributed facts in the next several paragraphs, and the quotation that follows this one, are from the history of the White Institute by Clara Thompson (2017) that appears as the lead article in this issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The history recounted in Thompson's presentation was useful to me in writing this article. I beg the reader's indulgence of some repetition of this material, which was unavoidable if I was to use Thompson's work in the way I felt I needed to do to present the history I wanted to present.

2 I use the word “real” here, along with the early interpersonalists, as a contrast with now-anachronistic forms of drive theory, in which the external world was largely a scaffold on which the fantasies and drive derivatives of the intrapsychic world were projected. But I print the word “real” in quotes because constructivists believe that although reality does exist, and supplies constraints on what can validly be claimed as real or true, its final form remains to be articulated in any particular instance, so that there is no single truth that exists in isolation from subjectivity. Explicit conscious experience is preceded by “unformulated experience” (Stern, 1983, 1997) or an “essential ambiguity” (Mitchell, 1993) that is articulated by emergent, nonrational processes of the interpersonal field.

3 There remains general agreement that frequency is significant, because it is often true that the more time is available, the greater the emotional intensity that can develop in the treatment. The use of the couch can be helpful, too, because it can focus patients on their inner lives. But today it has become much less common than it used to be, at least in North American psychoanalysis, to define psychoanalysis according to concrete factors such as these.

4 See Stern, 2015a, for quotation of the passages in which Sullivan most explicitly discussed the interpersonal field.

5 This is not the occasion to take up the complex general problem of unconscious structuring influences on conscious experience. I have taken up that problem elsewhere, arguing that any psychoanalytic theory requires some kind of conceptualization of such influences. In my conception, self-states, which I understand to be configurations of identity no more or less rational (or nonrational) than unconscious fantasy, serve this structuring function (Stern, 2014). Other unconscious relational configurations that could be cited here, among many, include Sullivan's (1953) “personifications,” Bowlby's (1973) “internal working models” (IWMs) of attachment, and Daniel Stern's (1985) “representations of interactions that have been generalized” (RIGs). To me, the concept of unconscious fantasy is defined by its primarily endogenous origins, even if in the hands of modern writers such fantasies also take on aspects of the external world (e.g., LaFarge, 2014). Unconscious relational configurations, on the other hand, are internalizations. For me, then, unconscious fantasies and unconscious relational configurations, despite the fact that both kinds of conception provide unconscious structuring influences, do not otherwise belong in the same category.

6 Other interpersonalists, more influenced by Erich Fromm's existentialism than Harry Stack Sullivan's empiricism (see the next section), disagree with this point of view. Erwin Singer (e.g., 1965) and Benjamin Wolstein (e.g., 1983, but the theme saturates most of his later work), are among these writers. But consider Wolstein's (1959) early recognition that the transference and the countertransference inevitably “interlock” with one another—by which I believe Wolstein meant something like what I have just written in the text. Later, though, Wolstein championed the unique individuality of both patient and analyst. The issue will remain complex for any student of Wolstein's work.

7 As I mentioned earlier, the NYU Postdoctoral Program originally had two “tracks” of training, the Freudian and the “I-H,” or Interpersonal–Humanistic. “Humanistic” was (and is today) meant to refer to the kinds of values described in the text. This use of the word testifies to the significance of existential–humanistic values in interpersonal psychoanalysis.

8 Freudian analysts, because of their embrace of the ideal of analytic neutrality and restraint, may more easily than other analysts commit an excess of emotional distance. Self psychologists, at least those of an earlier era, because of their continuous pursuit of an empathic appreciation of the patient's experience, may be more prone than other analysts to miss aggression, both their patients' and their own. And so on.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donnel B. Stern

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., is training analyst, supervising analyst, and faculty, William Alanson White Institute; adjunct clinical professor of psychology, clinical consultant, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is also the founder and editor of the “Psychoanalysis in a New Key” book series from Routledge. His most recent book is Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Routledge, 2015). His new book, The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference, coedited with Irwin Hirsch, will appear soon.