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PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES rely on accounts of child development to express their basic assumptions and to buttress their arguments about them. Developmental imagery is a prominent factor in how analysts organize clinical data. Analytic theories establish coherence between their theories of early development, motivation, psychic structure, psychopathology, and clinical technique.
Relational psychoanalysis has linked to those developmental models that have seen human contact as primary from the beginning. Within psychoanalysis, British object relationalists, interpersonalists, and self psychologists have highlighted this, while contemporary relationally oriented infant researchers have extended this orientation. They have contradicted the Freudian-Kleinian image of the irrational baby by describing the youngest infants' organizing, interpersonal competences.
Overall, relational analysis provides an acute integration of analytic theory and technique with contemporary developmental psychoanalysis and developmental psychology overall, rooted as it is in the view that people are essentially oriented to human relationships, throughout the life span. But while relational psychoanalysis draws heavily on the infant research image of the adaptive, social infant, it does not subsume its own developmental model to it. While frankly developmentalist, it has synthesized that point of view with a number of other crucial emphases: gender theory, social theory, trauma studies, nonlinear dynamic systems theories, and the irrationalist psychoanalytic orientations, all anchored in a philosophical orientation in contemporary dialectical constructivist hermeneutic epistemologies. In addition, the influence of developmental thinking has been annealed with interpersonal psychoanalysis. The inter-personalists'