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This edited volume brings together faculty of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS) to address an enduring question in psychoanalysis: what is mutative in psychoanalytic treatment? The book comprises 13 illuminating, previously unpublished papers offering a range of perspectives on the roles of insight and relationship experiences as therapeutic mechanisms. The quality of the chapters is uniformly high, and together they offer the reader an in-depth explication of many classic and contemporary views of therapeutic action. The book ends with an inspiring and moving interview of Hedda Bolgar by Michael Diamond.
The authors, trained in the Freudian tradition and representing diverse outgrowths of their shared theoretical origin, present different ways of understanding the roles of insight and relationship experiences in therapeutic action. Refreshingly, none of the authors pits interpretation against relationship experiences in a straightforward way, thus eschewing an oversimplified notion that has thwarted past conversations about therapeutic action. Instead, the authors consider various ways of understanding the interrelationships of the therapeutic potential of verbal insight, achieved through interpretation, and of new relational experiences offered by the therapeutic relationship. The consideration of relationship factors is broad but not fully representative of contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualizations of mutative relational experiences. Specifically, whereas self psychology is well represented, Lacanian, intersubjective, and other relational perspectives are not. As some intersubjective and relational perspectives are grounded in hermeneutic epistemology, which rejects the idea of insight separate from the relationship within which knowledge of self and other is constructed (rather than discovered), the conversation about therapeutic mechanisms within those traditions begins with different assumptions than those in this bo