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Time is at the heart of the psychoanalytic project. Indeed, as psychoanalysis evolved from a weeks or months-long, symptomatic treatment to a years or decades-long effort to heal the sequelae of devastations, deprivations, and traumas of patients’ formative years, questions of temporality have increasingly come to be seen as a critical dimension of that work. Increasingly, attending to the centrality of time in human experience has become deeply embedded in a psychoanalytic approach. Drawing on his long career of clinical work and rich clinical writing, Neil Skolnick has published a book that weaves together a series of articles on relational psychoanalysis that are bound together by his attentiveness to temporality. The book tracks both Skolnick’s evolution as an analyst and the transformation of psychoanalysis itself during and following the relational turn.
Skolnick has served as a faculty member in the Relational Track since its inception at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and like many of his contemporaries, the relational sensibility is part of his analytic DNA. As he makes clear in the book, Skolnick was both shaped by and an active participant in a movement that rejected the prevailing paradigm of Freudian ego psychology. Many of the older articles in the book capture the zeitgeist of a psychoanalytic era in which the relational school, far from being the dominant theoretical perspective that it is today (at least in the United States), was a radical and revolutionary departure from analytic practice and theorizing during a period Freudian hegemony. In fact, Skolnick recounts being chastised by a group of young analytic
candidates for “always justifying the relational shift” (Skolnick, 2020, p. 59). The students to whom Skolnick refers were coming of age in an era defined by relational principles and had never known an analytic world in which those principles had to be defended or would be derided as “not psychoanalytic.”
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