J: Yes, I had come to a place where I interpreted these other theorists somewhat differently. I felt that it wasn’t possible to excise something that is pre-experiential. The whole idea of drive or not drive is less interesting than making room for some kind of inner direction, that cannot be simply excised theoretically. You can read Fairbairn and Kohut and recognize that they don’t talk about drive in the same way, similar to Sullivan. But they all have some sense of who we are and how we fit into the world.
L: It strikes me that you used the word ‘pre-experiential’ right away. I recently spent a year comprehensively teaching Steve’s journal articles, because I noticed an interesting contrast between his books and earlier articles. There is more raw content in the articles than in the books, because certain points were smoothed over by the time he edited the books. It was an interesting exercise. I noticed a trend from beginning to end in regards to his main target. When he argued against drives, I found his real target to be the “pre.” I think he took from Sullivan that drives were pre-experiential, which suggests that personality is interpersonal and therefore doesn’t exist before pre-personal relations.
J: That was certainly a subject about which we both thought the other was deluded. I was baffled about how he did and did not think certain things, and the feeling was mutual. We talked about that disagreement for years after the Object Relations book. I couldn’t shake the idea that something pre-experiential has to be built into the theory in some way.
L: So the question remains: Can relationalists also have some notion of drives? Can we be relational, but also assume that there are some preconceptions preconceptions in terms of one’s core personality from birth? I know Steve was radically opposed to that idea.
J: I don’t see why you can’t be relational and believe in that too. It is interesting to think about the direction Steve would have gone with this idea if he were still alive. It seems to me that the specter that haunts the idea of “pre-experiential,” is the specter of the average expectable environment. If you believe in the pre-experiential idea, that everything else begins to lose its impact, it becomes more Hartmann. This raises concern about losing the nuances and elegances revealed by the relational theory. Considering that Steve has been gone for 15 years and the extent to which things have changed during this time, I wonder if he would be less focused on that at this point. As the voices in this conversation have become more diverse over the years, I think the issue has been redefined to a certain extent.
De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within (Relational Perspectives Book Series) (pp. 43-44). Taylor and Francis. Kindle edition.