Relational Psychoanalysis Out of Context: Response to Jon Mills

Abstract

The authors close the panel by mapping out and responding to Jon Mills’s critique of Relational psychoanalysis and provide a historical background within which to contextualize the framework for the debate. Specifically, they take up the flaws inherent in judging a theory based on an objectivist perspective and address indeterminate, decontextualized, and selective understandings of the constantly evolving theory and practice of contemporary relational and Relational psychoanalysis.

Keywords:

• anxiety of influence
• drives
• essentialism
• intersubjectivity
• multiplicity
• objectivity
• postmodernism
• relational psychoanalysis
• self-disclosure

Acknowledgments

Parts of this paper are based on an unpublished manuscript by Lewis Aron and Steven Kuchuck. We are grateful for Aron’s permission to include that material here.

Notes

¹ We are grateful to Lewis Aron for bringing this joke and its relevance here to our attention.

² Because this is such a pervasive misunderstanding of relational psychoanalysis, perhaps there is work to be done in further defining ways of maintaining this dialectic, and more explicit relational psychoanalytic scholarship needed around elucidating the movement between the intrapsychic and intersubjective in psychoanalytic process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Kuchuck

Steven Kuchuck, LCSW is the Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives: An International Journal of Integration and Innovation and Associate Editor of the Relational Perspectives Book Series from Routledge. He is a contributor to and editor of the book Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (Routledge, 2014) and contributor to and co-editor (with Adrienne Harris) of The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (Routledge, 2015) and serves on the Board of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP). He is on the faculty of NIP, NIP National Training Program, the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies and other institutes, and is currently the President-elect of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). www.stevenkuchuck.com

Rachel Sopher

Rachel Sopher, LCSW, is board director, supervisor, and faculty of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Institute, and faculty member of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She is senior editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives: A Journal of Integration and Innovation and is in private practice in New York City.