Object Relations and Social Relations

The Implications of the Relational Turn in Psychoanalysis

Simon Clarke, Herbert Hahn, Paul Hoggett, Simon Clarke, Herbert Hahn, Paul Hoggett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367105945
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429916663
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book has two essential aims. First, to introduce some of the key assumptions behind relational psychoanalysis to an international audience and to outline the points where this approach counters, complements, or extends existing object relations (Kleinian and Independent) traditions. Second, to consider some of the implications of the relational turn for the application of psychoanalytic concepts and methods beyond the consulting room. The emergence of what has become known as "the relational turn" in psychoanalysis has interesting implications not just for clinical practice, but for other psychoanalytically informed practices, such as group relations, the human service professions, and social research. Relational forms of psychoanalysis have emerged primarily in the USA, and as a result their core concepts and methods are less well-known in other countries, including the UK. Moreover, even within the USA, few attempts have so far been made to consider the wider implications of this development for social and political theory; intervention in groups and organizations, and the practice of social research.

Chapter One
Relational thinking: from culture to couch and couch to culture

Lynne Layton

Introduction: history and key assumptions of relational analytic theory

At one point in my personal analysis, my analyst, whom I had chosen in part because the self psychology and object relations books on her shelf suggested that she was someone who would not bludgeon me with predictable oedipal and penis envy interpretations, told me that the reason she had forgotten to call me at the agreed upon time during her three-month maternity leave was that I appear self-sufficient and give the impression of having no needs. This touched a very sore spot in me and I went off to seek consultation—having parents whose mantra when they did something hurtful was always "You're too sensitive," the last thing I needed was an analyst who made a big blunder and blamed it on something about me. We worked it out. But I begin with this vignette because I think that it is my sensitivity to this issue that drew me to what has come to be known as relational psychoanalysis. Of the many schools of psychoanalysis, none besides relational analysis, so far as I know, holds as a central ethical principle not just awareness, but acknowledgement, of the analyst’s complicity in the inevitable re-enactments that are at the heart of any treatment.

The term “relational psychoanalysis” has two common uses, one quite broad and one more narrow. In 1983, Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, a groundbreaking comparative analysis in which they divided the psychoanalytic terrain into drive theories, represented by Freud, and theories that posit that at the heart of psychic life are relationships, internal and external. They considered Sullivan, founder of interpersonal psychoanalysis, the primary progenitor of relational theories. Greenberg and Mitchell argued that although you cannot understand Sullivan without knowing Freud, you also cannot have it both ways: the drive model and the relational model’s assumptions lead to radically different ideas about development, technique, motivation, unconscious process, and therapeutic action. As Merton Gill (1995) elaborated, “classical theory emphasizes defenses against drive, and relational theory emphasizes defenses against altering patterns of interpersonal relationships” (p. 93). Gill clarifies that the distinction here is innate vs. experiential, not intrapsychic vs. interpersonal. In fact, relational analysts are every bit as focused on dreams, fantasies, ucs process and other staples of the intrapsychic as are drive analysts. But for relational analysts, the intrapsychic is marked by the individual’s idiosyncratic elaborations of actual relational experience. As a recent paper by the Boston Change Process Study Group (2007) argues, the interactive level has traditionally been seen as the mere instantiation of deeper forces and thus regarded as superficial. But, in a relational paradigm, the interactive process is primary, deep, “and generates the raw material from which we draw generalized abstractions that we term conflicts, defenses, and phantasy” (ibid., p. 16).

At the time that Mitchell and Greenberg’s book appeared, the dominant paradigm in psychoanalysis in the USA was ego psychology, but this paradigm was being challenged on several fronts, in particular, by the generation of interpersonalists that came after Sullivan, Horney, Fromm, and Thompson, primarily Edgar Levenson and Benjamin Wolstein, by Merton Gill; by the Balint–Winnicott wing of the British Independent Group; and by Kohut, founder of self psychology. When I trained in psychology in the 1980s, self psychology was clearly on its way to becoming the dominant paradigm, in part because increased awareness of the effects of trauma demanded theories that stressed what actually happened in one’s relational history. Although Mitchell (1988) went on to develop a version of what I will call the narrow definition of relational theory, his generous and intellectually curious spirit embraced all theorists who grounded their work in the ongoing effect of relational experience. So, in the broad sense, relational theory refers to any theory whose basic assumption is that development and unconscious phenomena are marked primarily by relationships, not by drives. This includes interpersonal, intersubjective, object relations, self psychology, and relational conflict models; indeed, conferences of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, the organization Mitchell and others founded, often also include versions of Jungian, Lacanian, and Kleinian theory. But, even in their early work, Greenberg and Mitchell differentiated relational theories that are drive theories from relational and interpersonal models that “view relational configurations as derivative of actual experience with others . . .” (1983, p. 102). In these models, for example, pure pleasure seeking and pure rage are seen not as manifestations of drive, but of breakdown in relationships. Interpretations are not valued merely for the content they convey, but for the relational transformations the interpretive event triggers.

Having trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, Mitchell was greatly influenced by the interpersonal tradition. By Mitchell’s own account (2004, p. 532), Levenson was the “dominant intellectual influence at White” when Mitchell trained in the mid-1970s. Although others may not agree, I would place Levenson at the beginning of the relational tradition in its narrow sense, so I shall spend some time here elaborating the groundwork he laid. In 1972, Levenson wrote The Fallacy of Understanding, one thesis of which is that all concepts, including psychoanalytic ones, change in meaning over time, as does how we see patients and pathologies. Levenson calls the current age of psychoanalysis organismic, wherein the health of each part of the human system is considered to be dependent on the whole context in which we operate. Levenson uses the term perspectivism to describe the organism. In any given system, he argues, there are different realities operating and the perspective from which one sees things always makes sense to the person seeing it, that “within the organized totality of the other person’s world, his perceptions and behavior are coherent and appropriate” (ibid., p. 77). If this is the case, the analyst’s job is not to show patients how they distort, and interpretation is neither the only nor even perhaps the primary tool in the analyst’s toolkit; rather, understanding the sense it makes to the person is primary. On this, self psychology and the interpersonal school are in agreement. They diverge dramatically, however, on their view of the patient–analyst relationship and therapeutic action. Levenson’s radicalism lies primarily in the way he elaborated on both Sullivan’s idea of the analyst as participant observer and on the interpersonalist emphasis on the impact of culture. One thing that differentiates Levenson from most analysts in most schools is his view, derived from Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, and Thompson, that the family is only one of the systems that impacts the psyche; for Levenson, the culture is part of the psyche, too, and the 1972 book in fact includes an interesting study he did of adolescent dropouts. Levenson writes:

But if we also recognize the hierarchy of systems, the organization of systems, then it must also be recognized that . .. we belong to a network of hegemonic social structures, from our businesses or professions, through national and supernational networks. [ibid., p. 78]

Of course Levenson learned from Fromm, who wrote about the ways that particular social systems pull for particular kinds of social character. Levenson’s focus is perhaps more indebted, however, to R. D. Laing, who tracked the way that people become part of the crazy systems in which they find themselves. “Enter a prison,” Levenson says, “one is part of the prison system” (ibid., p. 165). Yet, Levenson’s theory is not determinist: for interpersonalists, perceptions are shaped in interaction with others, not by the reactions of others. Levenson sustains the tension between an idiosyncratic subjectivity and interacting psyches permeated by social experience.

Perhaps Levenson’s most important contribution to what has now become known as relational theory, however, was his development of a constructivist two-person vs. a one-person psychology. He says,

As psychotherapist, I cannot be sure that what I have said is heard as I said it, I cannot be sure that the perception of the patient, if different from mine, is any less appropriate, and I cannot be sure that I did not say what he thinks I said, rather than what I think I said. [ibid., p. 99]

Imagine, for a moment, what such a thought does to our traditional notions of transference and countertransference, projection and projective identification, neutrality and resistance. One could say, without too much exaggeration, that the pages of relational and interpersonal journals are currently filled with papers that elaborate the effects of Levenson’s insight that every moment of the analytic encounter is shaped by the interaction between two unconscious minds, operating within power relations that are both symmetric and asymmetric (Aron, 1996). To return to my opening vignette, what Levenson means when he seeks a psychoanalysis that is “beyond understanding” is the acknowledgement of the analyst’s complicity in what transpires in analysis. And this goes beyond postmodern and constructivist ideas of mere co-creation to the inevitability of what relational theorists call “mutual enactments”. For Levenson, Freud’s most important discovery has nothing to do with metapsychology or any particular contents of the mind; rather, the important discovery is that in talking, we recreate relational patterns. Levenson says,

It is not the therapist’s uncoding of the dynamics that makes the therapy, not his “interpretations” of meaning and purpose, but, rather, his extended participation with the patient. It is not his ability to resist distortion by the patient (transference) or to resist his own temptation to interact irrationally with the patient (countertransference), but, rather, his ability to be trapped, immersed and participating in the system and then to work his way out. (1972, p. 183]

What distinguishes psychotherapy from psychoanalysis is that, in the latter, the continuous mutual enactments between patient and analyst are talked about and made explicit. As I shall discuss below, some of the most interesting contemporary relational and interpersonal analysts are trying to understand the nature of mutual enactments and how we get ourselves out of them.

Before leaving Levenson, I want to mention that because he sees analysis as primarily working “not because of what it says but how it proceeds” (1983, p. 111), because every interpretation is, for him, primarily an interaction, he describes the goal of analysis as “an expansion of awareness, an enrichment of pattern” (ibid., p. 31)— not, as classical analysis might argue, a relinquishing of infantile wishes or a correction of distortion.

Stephen Mitchell, as I said earlier, trained at White and was a student of Levenson’s. In the 1980s, some members of the interpersonal/humanistic track faculty at the New York University Post-doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis invited Mitchell to teach object relations theory (Mitchell, 2004, p. 535). As I have heard it, however, some key interpersonalists in authority were opposed to teaching object relations in that track. In 1989, after some years of political power struggles between the interpersonal/humanistic track and the Freudian track, the “quasi-independent” (ibid.) relational track at NYU Postdoc was born. In that track, Mitchell worked with Emmanuel Ghent, Lew Aron, Jessica Benjamin, Neil Altman, and many of the other clinicians who would become the face of relational psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, analysts such as Jay Greenberg, Darlene Ehrenberg, Phillip Bromberg, and Donnel Stern, assuming both interpersonal and relational identities, have developed their own integrated versions of interpersonal analysis at William Alanson White and in the pages of their journal, Contemporary Psychoanalysis. For example, Contemporary Psychoanalysis published Irwin Hoffman’s foundational relational paper, “The patient as interpreter of the analyst’s experience” in 1983, the same year Greenberg and Mitchell’s book came out. In 1991, Mitchell founded Psychoanalytic Dialogues, the high quality of which brought relational theory into the US mainstream.

Before moving on to elaborate the way I use relational theory in my own work, I want to mention briefly four emphases of relational theory that appear to me to mark the way this school differs from other psychoanalytic schools: development, the unconscious, mutual enactments, and the pleasures of attunement. With regard to development, Hirsch (1998) has persuasively argued that a primary difference between even those who consider themselves relational in the narrow sense is whether or not they attribute psychopathology to developmental arrest (as self psychologists do) or to unconscious conflict. Mitchell disagrees with developmental models that privilege early over later experience, and he critiques the developmental arrest model because it figures the subject as a stuck baby and not as an active weaver of the loom of his/her experience (1988, p. 274). Both models tend, however, to ground human motivation in the “striving for safety and security of self and for loved others” (Hirsch, 1998, p. 518). This premise derives from Sullivan and Fromm, as well as from Fairbairnian object relations theory and attachment theory. If we recall Levenson’s suggestion that all psychoanalytic theories and diagnostic categories are historical, we might wonder about the current dominance of relational theories in the USA: does their dominance suggest that we live in a historical moment in which the anxiety about security is more salient than anxiety about sex and aggression?

Personally, I am more drawn to a conflict model such as the one elaborated by Mitchell, who suggests that the way we respond to the unique relational matrices in which we develop, our relational history, makes us who we are. In his developmental theory, psychosexual stages, Oedipus complexes, dichotomies between the preoedipal and oedipal are subordinate to the relational contexts in which they occur. Mitchell’s thesis is that what is deep in the psyche, what is intrapsychic, is a result of childhood experiences of separation, physical illness and pain, sibling comparison and competition, childhood dependency. These, he says,

and other travails of early life are certain to make childhood at least intermittently stormy, and early relationships inevitably somewhat insecure. . .. One is always, in some ultimate sense, at the mercy of adults, [and the child has to] design himself within the spaces provided by the contours of parental character ... [1988, pp. 275–276]

So, sources of conflict derive from the pull to mould oneself to parental and cultural demands, to negotiate union vs. separateness, from the demand on the child to work out how to accommodate simultaneously to mother and father when the rules for accommodation conflict. Development is not about shifting zones, but about shifting relational needs that grow in complexity and intimacy (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, pp. 102–103).

Most critiques of relational theory focus on what appears to other schools to be its emphasis on surface and its abandonment of unconscious process. Relational theorists are only fairly recently beginning to elaborate the theory of unconscious process that has been implicit in many of their clinical descriptions. One such elaboration grounds unconscious process in dissociation of relational experience rather than repression of unacceptable impulses. A cornerstone of Sullivan’s (1953) theory, elaborated by Fromm, was the idea (borrowed from George Herbert Mead’s model of self) that the slings and arrows of early relational experience lead to splits between what a person considers me and not-me. Children intuit from the beginning what self states are and are not responded to, what the parent finds acceptable and unacceptable, and often the unacceptable parts of self and modes of relating are dissociated. Bromberg (2003) writes about the undramatic but highly painful traumas of living day in and day out in a family that systematically disavows the existence of a child’s subjective experience and discredits the validity of that child’s emotional states. Traumas of all kinds make a person hypervigilant for a repeat, always screening for danger; the screening itself makes it very hard to have new experience that would contest the old.

A key premise of relational analy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Relational thinking: from culture to couch and couch to culture
• CHAPTER TWO Democratizing psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER THREE Staying close to the subject
• CHAPTER FOUR Relational thinking and welfare practice
• CHAPTER FIVE Artistic output as intersubjective third
• CHAPTER SIX Psycho-social research: relating self, identity, and otherness
• CHAPTER SEVEN The importance of relational thinking in the practice of psycho-social research: ontology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics
• CHAPTER EIGHT How does a turn towards relational thinking influence consulting practice in organizations and groups?
• CHAPTER NINE Inquiry as relational practice: thinking relationally about the practice of teaching and learning
• INDEX