The Relational Turn, the Therapeutic Alliance, and Psychotherapy Research: Strange Bedfellows or Postmodern Marriage?

I AM GRATEFUL to Jay Greenberg for asking me to write about the influence of the relational turn on my work, and extremely pleased to have an opportunity to honor Stephen Mitchell's memory in this fashion. I had the good fortune of being in clinical supervision with Steve and of collaborating on a project with him shortly before he died. I had been deeply influenced by his writing for many years, and the experience of beginning to develop a relationship with him is one that I will always cherish. One of the qualities I most admired in Steve was his openness to different perspectives and his ability to play with seemingly irreconcilable visions of reality in a way that pointed toward a larger whole.

My central focus in this article is on the way in which relational psychoanalysis has influenced my thinking as a psychotherapy researcher and as a clinical theorist who writes both for analysts and for clinicians of other orientations. The divide that separates the world of psychoanalysis from the worlds of both mainstream psychotherapy research and other therapeutic traditions is, in many respects, a large one. At the same time, there is a critical need for psychoanalysts to become more actively involved in a dialogue with these different cultures. While the rumors of Freud's death may be exaggerated, the declining fortunes of psychoanalysis in recent years make this type of dialogue increasingly important. As I have argued elsewhere, the type of insularity that has been characteristic of the psychoanalytic tradition does not, to put it mildly, serve it well these days (Safran, 2001; Safran & Aron, 2001). The growing demand by the health care system and by the public in general for some form of accountability, and associated developments such as the American Psychological Association Task Force on Psychological Intervention Guidelines (1995) or the American Psychiatric Association Steering Committee