Cross-Continental Divides Regarding Survival, Play, and Enactment: Reply to Commentaries by Keene, Ilahi, and Coen

Abstract

The author distinguishes between the ways that the Independent Group and Relational Theorists conceptualize object survival, play, enactment, and mutuality. American relational theory is simultaneously focused on both the patient's and analyst's experience and the patient's inner representational world. Interaction is informed by and informs our understanding of the patient's conflicts including forms of enactment. In contrast, analysts from the Independent Group tend to view the American interest in interpersonal phenomena and perceptual dimensions of the patient's experience as a distraction from unconscious representations. For relational analysts in the United States, maternal functions of reverie emphasized by the Independent Group are seen as one dimension of the analyst's complex subjectivity, which may be used in containment and interpretation. For relationally oriented analysts containment itself is postulated as to some degree porous unlike the notion of analytic functions of reverie emphasized by the Independent Group. The author tries to focus on these points of divergence and overlap between the two theoretical orientations and their application to case material.