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William James, lecturing before the general public, is said to have likened the history of philosophy to a turtle standing on the back of another turtle. “But Professor James,” a member of the audience asked, “what is underneath the bottom turtle?” “Madam,” James replied, “it is turtles all the way down.”
The present article focuses on the contributions of Benjamin Wolstein within the theoretical evolution of the American school of interpersonal psychoanalysis. As with James's commentary on plumbing the depths of philosophy, one is well advised to proceed with humility in tracing the pathways of complex thought. How much more so when attempting to clarify Benjamin Wolstein's rich and densely packed intellectual trajectory from Sullivan's midcentury interpersonalism to the millennium's relationism. Wolstein had no conceptual difficulty with these labels. He saw them—like Dewey's (1896) foundational understanding of the reflex arc—as naturally transformational. He recognized that one concept flows into the other. In fact, each concept relies on the other. But where Dewey's arc follows the progress of a muscular nerve twitch, Wolstein's parallel arc transforms the intellectual history of twentieth-century American psychoanalysis. As Wolstein frequently noted, Harry Stack Sullivan's orientation had been the study of interpersonal relations. That “interpersonalists” from the start had lopped off “relationism” in describing their practice was a dialectical setup—a synthesis waiting to happen. “Relationism” necessarily completed “interpersonalism” by bringing explicitly to the consensual social field the joint operations of unique human need and desire. The painstakingly fastidious dialectical process that would integrate interpersona with psyche, public and private, within the joint therapeutic field spanned fifty years of Wolstein's professional life.
For the purpose of the present discussion, this timeline is divided into two sections. The first—reflecting interpersonalis