Commentaries

Jay Greenberg performs an extremely important service in challenging pivotal facets of the relational orientation and its literature. With the acuity and scholarship that are his hallmarks, Greenberg delineates many of the issues relationalists struggle with—sometimes privately, sometimes in closeted teaching settings, but not often enough in public forums. I am impressed with his boldness in identifying how the relational perspective sometimes focuses too narrowly on its new vistas, thereby potentially losing sight of the broader landscape. It can only add to the vigor and utility of our theory building when we submit new ideas to steady self-scrutiny. This should indeed become the rule rather than the exception in psychoanalytic theorizing of every persuasion.

Several areas of ambiguity in Greenberg's paper complicate my efforts to understand and respond to his arguments. The author says that the “excess” of the relational perspective lies in the tension between its formal theoretical precepts regarding the analyst's mode of participation and their practical realization in the clinical interchange. This excess, according to Greenberg, is expressed primarily in the body of literature that reflects clinical practice, as opposed to its theoretical underpinnings. Yet those underpinnings themselves also seem open to question, at least as they are articulated in this paper. It is unclear whether in Greenberg's mind he is really aiming his critique of the relational perspective squarely at its clinical applications and their