Straw Men, Stereotypes, and Constructive Dialogue: A Response to Mills’s Criticism of the Relational Approach

Abstract

This discussion of Mills’s presentation first takes issue with his divisive discourse, which pushes differences to the extreme and erects straw men in order to vehemently attack them. I then present an alternate view of postmodern influences on relational psychoanalysis and respond to Mills’s criticism of self-disclosure specifically as related to the work of Jody Davies.

Keywords:

• constructive dialogue
• intersubjectivity
• postmodernism
• transference love
• universals

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chana Ullman

Chana Ullman, PhD, is a Clinical Psychologist, Training Psychoanalyst, and faculty at the Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She lives and practices in Rehovot, Israel. Dr. Ullman is faculty and supervisor at the relational track of the School of Psychotherapy, Sackler School of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University, and a supervisor at the School of Psychotherapy at Bar-Ilan University. She is the former chair of the Tel-Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Dr. Ullman is currently the president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is the author of the book The Transformed Self: The Psychology of Religious Conversion (Plenum, 1989) and of numerous publications regarding witnessing, political context, and the relational perspective on psychoanalytic process.