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This book is the second volume in a series presenting what its editors, Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, see as an emerging new tradition in psychoanalysis. The first volume, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition, edited by Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron, was published in 1999. In their introduction to the second volume, published in 2005, the editors describe the six-year period between the publication of the two collections as one of “great promise and a great loss within the relational and wider analytic community.” The death of Stephen Mitchell shortly after the completion of the first volume forms the sad backdrop for the publication of this one.
Wayne C. Booth (1979) offers the following oath to be taken by book reviewers: “I will publish nothing favorable or unfavorable about books or articles that I have not read through at least once. I will try to publish nothing about any book … until I have understood it, which is to think I can give an account that the author himself will recognize as just. Any attempt at overstanding will follow this initial act of attempted respect” (quoted in Patai and Corral 2004, p. 688). I needed to keep this caveat in mind, because I do not come to the subject of this book, relational psychoanalysis, as a first-time commentator. I have authored or coauthored reviews of important relational authors (Bachant and Richards 1993; Richards 1999) and engaged in a sharp and perhaps somewhat notorious interchange with Stephen Mitchell himself in the pages of the Division 39 Section 1 newsletter, the Round Robin. But I have tried here to live up to Booth's principles; I read the anthology cover to cover three times, and have done my best to tackle each paper on its author's terms, and to consider as well the editors' intentions in putting together this particular collection. Through his coinage “overstanding,”