Mills, J. (2005). A Critique of Relational Psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Psychol., 22(2):155-188
Psychoanalysis today is largely a psychology of consciousness:
Post-and neo-Freudians form a marginalized community within
North America in comparison to contemporary relational and
intersubjective theorists, who emphasize the phenomenology of
lived conscious experience, dyadic attachments, affective
attunement, social construction, and mutual recognition over the
role of insight and interpretation. Despite the rich historical
terrain of theoretical variation and advance, many contemporary
approaches have displaced the primacy of the unconscious.
Notwithstanding the theoretical hairsplitting that historically
occurs across the psychoanalytic domain, one is beginning to see
with increasing force and clarity what S. Mitchell and L. Aron
(1999) referred to as the emergence of a new tradition, namely,
relational psychoanalysis. Having its edifice in early object
relations theory, the British middle school and American
interpersonal traditions, and self psychology, relationality is
billed as “a distinctly new tradition” (Mitchell & Aron, 1999, p.
x). What is being labeled as the American middle group of
psychoanalysis (C. Spezzano, 1997), relational and
intersubjective theory have taken center stage. It may be argued,
however, that contemporary relational and intersubjective
perspectives have failed to be properly critiqued from within
their own school of discourse. The scope of this article is largely
preoccupied with tracing (a) the philosophical underpinnings of
contemporary relational theory, (b) its theoretical relation to
traditional psychoanalytic thought, (c) clinical implications for
therapeutic practice, and (d) its intersection with points of
consilience that emerge from these traditions.
