Truth, Human Relatedness, and the Analytic Process: An Interpersonal/Relational Perspective

So often has my judgment deceived me … that I always suspect it, right or wrong … For all this, I reverence truth as much as any body; and when it has slipped us, if a man will but take me by the hand, and … search for it, as for a thing we have both lost, and can neither of us do well without,—I'll go to the world's end with him.

Many years ago, while trying to please my first analytic supervisor with a story about a highly ‘compliant’ patient who had openly disagreed with something I had said about her, I described the moment as an important event in her treatment because it also made me aware that what I had said to her was not true. “What do you mean by true?” said he. Taken aback, and a bit irritated, I restated it a bit more loudly: “Um, you know—it wasn't true!” “It sounds more like it wasn't accurate”, he countered. “What do you mean by ‘accurate’?” I asked, somewhat defiantly. One thing led to another, and even though I didn't appreciate his smugness, as the supervision went on I increasingly appreciated the fact that whatever took place between us could always be talked about. But what I came to value most of all was the power of his distinction between truth and accuracy. Truth, as a subjective phenomenon, continues to have an important place in my clinical work, but only in the context of an ongoing dialectic with the intersubjective phenomenon of accuracy. My supervisor's openness to jointly processing our somewhat contentious ‘moment of truth’, and his similar openness throughout the supervision, helped me also to experience the distinction between being a psychoanalyst and doing psychoanalysis. And it is the intrinsic tension between being and doing, like that between accuracy and truth, that allows, I believe, for the relational consensus necessary to both shaping therapeutic growth and the clinical sensibility I will try to convey in this essay.

Relational psychoanalysis is now a central piece of the psyc