Negotiating Otherness: The Analyst's Contribution to Creating New Ways of Being and Relating in the Analytic Process: Commentary on Paper by Frank Summers

Abstract

In this discussion of Summers' “Creating New Ways of Being and Relating,” a synthesis of British Object Relations and American Relational contributions to theory and practice, the author suggests that Relational Clinical Theory constitued from the beginning an integration of theories that included Independent thinking. This integration of American Interpersonal and British Object Relations thinking included the facilitation within the psychoanalytic relationship of the emergence of potential space and the possibility of regression, which added several new dimensions to the clinical armamentarium of the generally more interactive Interpersonal approach as it was defined before the emergence of the synthesis that came to be called “Relational.” The implications of the synthesis of Interpersonal and Object Relations thinking in American Relational Psychoanalysis are explored in relation to both contemporary clinical theory and technique.