A Few Regrets

ABSTRACT

This essay moves beyond my earlier focus on relational excess and turns a critical eye on my own work. After describing my relational holding model, I address its limitations—both theoretical and clinical. What is problematic in the implicit analytic ideal embedded in the concept of holding? How does this vision of therapeutic process both add to and narrow the clinical arena? What is absent, overlooked, or just plain wrong in this perspective? I address the dialectics embedded within the holding metaphor, their crucial and problematic implications. I then muse about what has shifted my relationship to my own theory over time. My aim is to push past othering and toward theoretical self-examination.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Margery Kalb, Leora Trub, and members of my Wednesday study groups for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

¹ It’s worth noting that there’s a kind of holding that we all do independent of our theory. It emerges out of the implicit relational knowing that is neither planned nor necessarily conscious. Holding is embedded in our capacity for attunement, a procedural empathic response to our patient that pulls us away from confrontation or interpretation and toward a softer, more containing way of being at sensitive clinical moments.

² It’s equally true, of course, that explicit relational engagement can emerge out of the analyst’s desire to know and be known.

³ I focus here on holding’s underbelly mainly in work with dependent patients. I discuss the potential risks of holding other affect states in Slochower (1996/2014b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joyce Slochower

Joyce Slochower, Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY. She is faculty and supervisor, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies, National Training Program of NIP, Steven Mitchell Center, and PINC in San Francisco. Second Editions of her 1996 and 2006 books, Holding and Psychoanalysis, A Relational Perspective and Psychoanalytic Collisions were released in 2014. She is co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of De-idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within and De-centering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique.