Afterword

THE ESSAYS included in this memorial volume offer their readers a kind of whirlwind tour through some of the most important currents in contemporary American psychoanalysis. Organized around the broad theme of the impact that relational thinking has had on various traditions within and closely adjacent to psychoanalysis, they also address the history of reciprocal influence among the relational model and other models. This process of mutual influence has been decisive in shaping the conceptual landscape within which all analysts operate today.

In this Afterword I record a set of more or less unsystematic reflections that have been inspired by the papers. Reading them has been both illuminating and personally moving for me: illuminating because of the sophistication with which they engage some of the most interesting issues that analysts are thinking about, moving because each paper has reminded me of conversations that Steve Mitchell and I had over the decades of our friendship. Accordingly, the points on which I have commented are those which struck me as most evocative for any one of a variety of reasons; they are not necessarily those the authors themselves would consider central. My musings are intended as the commentary of somebody who lived through the origins and early development of relational psychoanalysis, looking at what has emerged from those early days as reflected in the work of the authors who have generously contributed to this memorial.

Some of what I say returns me to ideas that Steve and I were trying to get at when we wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory as an exercise in comparative psychoanalysis (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). Others reflect things we talked about when we were rethinking some of the fundamental premises of psychoanalysis through the lens of what we had learned in training outside of what was then the mainstream. All that I discuss reflects a perspective of my own that was first formed in dialogue with Steve over the ye