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Aron's book represents the fourth volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series of the Analytic Press. The series, edited by Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron, has contributed considerably to the articulation of the relational psychoanalytic orientation. (Other volumes include Charles Spezzano's Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis; Neil Altman's The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens; Karen Maroda's Surrender and Transformation: Mutuality in Relational Analysis; just to mention a few.)
What is relational theory? Aron quotes Emmanuel Ghent, one of the originators of the concept, at length, and indeed there is no better way to put it: “There is no such thing as a relational analyst; there are only analysts whose backgrounds vary considerably, but who share a broad outlook in which human relations—specific, unique human relations—play a superordinate role in the genesis of character and of psychopathology, as well as in the practice of psychoanalytic therapeutics” (Ghent, 1992, p. xviii).
Although the relational perspective was formally launched in the 1980s, it enhances much older concepts. Daniel Stern acknowledged back in 1988 that “Ferenczi was the first major thinker who placed the psychoanalytic situation more squarely at the center of psychoanalytic inquiry…. Ferenczi and Balint's insistence on a two-person psychology for psychoanalysis was a precursor to an approach that placed the mutual interaction … at the very center in understanding psychic development” (Stern, 1988, p. xiii). Aron, a widely noted Ferenczi scholar, also acknowledges his debt to Ferenczi. In fact, he credits the publishing of Ferenczi's Clinical Diaries in English in 1988 as a “critical event for many relational analysts who suddenly found that they had an important progenitor.”
The relational paradigm has quickly assumed a central position in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Ghent notes that there is a distinct danger that “the