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Adrienne Harris is a serious advocate for a very particular, and currently popular, perspective on psychoanalytic theory and process. The working assumption that psychoanalysis needs a relational corrective, particularly in its developmental models, is the theoretical spine of her book, volume 25 in the Relational Perspectives Series. Relational psychoanalysts protest “the theorist … as authority, the magisterial one who knows” (p. 9) and in so doing have developed ways of speaking and thinking that have become almost impossible to challenge without mistakenly being considered outdated, even out of touch. Harris's words make most clear what she hopes to accomplish; the following passage may serve as the backdrop of this review, in which I hope to continue an important debate about serious differences which, even when enriching our theoretical matrix, sometimes threaten its foundation:
The developmental models I use—variations of chaos theory and complexity theory—all privilege variation over the statistical concept of central tendency, a focus on the average or mean values of any behavior or experience. Because I am interested in variation within individuals as well as between people, I use the term soft assembly to describe the protean, multipathed but planful and patterned unfolding of experience, such as becoming gendered. Multiplicity offers a certain psychic flexibility that, in relation to shifting objective and social contexts, is distinctly adaptive [pp. 28-29].
Harris repeatedly reminds the reader that all of mental life is “variable,” “multilevel,” “multiple,” “manifold,” “multifunctional,” “multidimensional,” and more. Her book is rich in references to