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.
Almost forty years ago, I presented a paper at the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I focused on Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson in order to revisit the contention that psychoanalysis constituted a general psychology. I wanted to chart the objectives that these two had set themselves, “the theoretical strategies and tactics they devised and whether more than a generation later—to continue the military metaphor—their campaigns” were still operational. I argued that they were not. And, in doing research for the paper, what had struck me was the paucity of clinical material in their writing. Hartmann's work was “known for its lack of clinical detail. Erikson's seemed to stand in marked contrast;” but his clinical data were rarely psychoanalytic. This dearth surprised me: it suggested an uneasiness about the discipline even “when psychoanalysis enjoyed its greatest vogue in the United States.”1
In succeeding decades, that uneasiness became more manifest. At the same time, something that can be thought of as a return to the consulting room took place. (In Britain, the consulting room has never been eclipsed; it has always been front and center.) In what follows, I want to take a look at relational psychoanalysis in the US and contemporary Kleinian thinking in the UK. The one gained traction in the 1980s and can lay claim to being the theory of choice among young analysts and psychoanalytic candidates. The other has a long pedigree stretching back to the 1930s and has been renewed generation after generation. And, though I have let the authors speak for themselves, my own preference for the contemporary Kleinians will become amply apparent.
Stephen A, Mitchell sounded the clarion in the opening pages of Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. The relational theories which he clamed “have dominated psychoanalytic thinking” in the past generation, may differ from one another; but “taken together they have changed the natur