Contextualizing Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis: Bi-Directional Influence and Proposed Syntheses*

THIS PAPER is in response to an invited symposium addressing the impact that relational psychoanalysis has had on other psychoanalytic traditions and, specifically with regard to myself, on self psychology. This, of course, is an extremely complex and difficult question—even more so because the development of relational psychoanalysis and the ongoing evolution of self psychology have been occurring on a concurrent time line. While we can focus on the correspondences and differences between relational and contemporary self-psychological theories, influence is probably bi-directional and, therefore, very difficult to assess. Inasmuch as classical self psychology predates relational psychoanalysis, it naturally leads to the reverse question: How did Kohut's self psychology contribute to the development of relational psychoanalysis?

What is “relational psychoanalysis”? Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) first introduced the term to define a fundamental shift that had occurred in the field of psychoanalysis evidenced in the conceptual similarity among a number of contemporary theories that radically departed from the drive/structure model. In contrast to drive/structure models in which drives are central in psychological life, relational theories posit that “relations with others constitute the fundamental building blocks of mental life” (p. 3). Simultaneously and independently, Atwood and Stolorow (1984) introduced their concept of intersubjectivity to designate the inter-subjective fields that are formed by the intersections of two or more subjectivities. Intersubjective and relational fields are equivalent concepts, both capturing the embeddedness of the individual within an intersubjective or relational field (matrix). In contrast to the classical model with its