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Why read any anthology of psychoanalytic work? These tomes commonly sit on library reference shelves, waiting for students taking survey courses and for the instructors who teach them. Here worth considering throughout is Relational Psychoanalysis, Volume 4: Expansion of Theory, a fresh sampling of papers, primarily plucked from the last decade as the relational movement began to congeal. It contains many of the clearest voices across the panoply of predominantly American Relational, Self Psychological and Interpersonal theorists.
Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris (also the series editors for the 52-book Routledge Relational Perspectives Book Series) carry the banner, unfurled by Stephen A. Mitchell and Aron in the 1999 inaugural volume, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition and within the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues, published since 1991. Their unfettered enthusiasm for new thinking continues—across theoretical positions—and encourages a diversity of focus and a freedom of style, here, and in a clinical companion, Relational Psychoanalysis: Vol. 5: Evolution of Process , that can surprise, jog preconceptions and invite further consideration.
In her engaging Foreward, Hazel Ipps states that what these writings generally share is the dialectics of self and other. The relational enterprise itself, she continues, is organized around the Bantu understanding of “ubuntu” or “a person is a person through other people” (p. xx). Ubuntu implies human interrelatedness and interdependence, and an essential and genuine intersubjectivity and empathy. Although I miss the editorial introductions to individual papers in previous Relational