Reply to Hirsch

I offer a brief reply to Hirsch. Our two essays speak for themselves and do not need repeating. There is much of value in Hirsch's article. Hirsch's extensive and informative elaboration of the distinction between Sullivan's and Fromm's ways of working, and their influence on subsequent interpersonal analysts, was especially helpful. He is also correct in crediting Levenson with a key role in introducing perspectivism into psychoanalysis, and in crediting interpersonal psychoanalysis more generally for its momentous contributions to understanding and working with countertransference.

Hirsch is accurate in saying that relational psychoanalysis began as an umbrella term, although it has become a more integrative movement. I agree with Hirsch that interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis overlap in important ways. I see relational psychoanalysis to a large extent as an outgrowth of interpersonal psychoanalysis. And I take Hirsch's caveat as my own; he makes the important point that he does not speak for all interpersonalists, and of course I don't speak for all relational analysts, just for my own understanding of an evolving relational sensibility.

There are, however, some misrepresentations of my own thinking, and of my portrayal of relational psychoanalysis, that I feel it is important to correct. Hirsch misrepresents how I portray the relational perspective when he says I present it as an orientation where “analysts actively try to avoid being separate objects or separate selves vis à vis patients…. [There is] an emphasis on holding and empathy and use of analysts primarily as reparative objects. Language, [Frankel] states, is used to establish a resonance; a oneness with patients. The patient is a child, not simply someone with numerous internalized child aspects of self. As a child, the patient is not responsible for choice….” I did not describe this as the relational perspective. It is the object relations—not the relational—perspective that I des