You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Italy, everybody is Catholic, even the Protestants.
Jay Greenberg, one of the founders of Relational psychoanalysis, uses this quip to evoke the climate of American psychoanalysis in the 1970s and early ‘80 s. The Mother Church was Ego Psychology; its knights were the vast majority of American psychoanalysts, trained in classical technique, loyal to its magic, hostile to heresy (Greenberg & Aron, 2018) and quick to identify as “not psychoanalysis” anything that didn’t center on drives, adaptation and intrapsychic conflict.
In 1983, Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell published Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, which presented an alternative to Ego Psychology—one that didn’t do away with the unconscious, but that organized the story around human beings: Where drives had been now there were people, out in the world and inside the patient’s mind. And where classical technique (reticent, authoritative, theory-driven) had been, now there was an analyst skeptical of his own authority and striving not for interpretive accuracy but for authenticity and emotional connection between analyst and patient.
Outside Greenberg and Mitchell’s community at NYU PostDoc, the book was greeted with brickbats. At the Freudian institutes uptown, Greenberg and Mitchell were heckled in meetings and denounced in journals—not surprising but a little ironic since Greenberg and Mitchell never meant for their Relational ontology to threaten or replace Classical/Ego Psychology. They believed that Relational thinking would live “forever” alongside mainstream Freudianism with the two incompatible worldviews developing each on its own (Greenberg & Aron, 2018).
That’s not what happened. Relational thinking ended up having a huge effect on much of American Freudian thinking (Druck, 2019; Schafer, 1994; Sohn, 2018). For various reasons including more women in the field and new financial pressures (Layton, 2018), the values underlying relational psychoanalysis have become the bulwark against which all con