James McLaughlin was one of a handful of eminent American psychoanalysts, trained within the confines of the then-dominant ego psychology mold in the 1950s and 1960s, who led the growing acceptance of the more flexibly nuanced two-person psychology, associated with the “relational turn.” This transformation is traced in McLaughlin's writings as they evolved from his early papers through his capstone summarizing book. McLaughlin is shown to have been an underappreciated psychoanalytic theorist and clinician.