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Shelley Doctors described the relational ‘turn’ in psychoanalysis as a broad umbrella beneath which are many different theories and concepts. Stephen Mitchell, who founded the Relational School, proceeded from the American Interpersonal School and British Object Relations. There the drive-defense model of the mind was distinguished from those models that posited that the mind was formed through relationships, hence the term ‘relational theories.’ Robert Stolorow and George Atwood, collaborating with Bernard Brandchaft, created Intersubjectivity theory. They were influenced by Kohut's Self Psychology and a desire to disencumber clinical psychoanalysis from its metapsychology. There the child's mind is conceptualized as forming through interaction with, and under the influence of, the already patterned mind of significant others. Intersubjectivity is a relational theory because psychological growth and transformation are understood to occur through interaction with others, whose modes of organizing their experiences both differ from, and are similar to, one's own. All psychological products, including “fantasies, defenses or interpretations, are understood to bear the imprint of the context in which they were formed.” Citing Jessica Benjamin, Doctors noted that the goal of the relationalists is to explicate the pervasive effects of human relationships on psychological development, and on internal psychic mechanisms and fantasies.
Relational treatment is a process of ‘participatory inquiry’ and mutual influence, which seeks to understand the principles by which the patient lives. Relationalists conceive of the clinical situation as including two active parties who co-construct a psychoanalytic encounter between them. Lachmann and Beebe's observation of mothers and infants are used to describe ‘structures of interaction.’ Interaction involves self-regulation, which arises from within the individual, and mutual or interactive regulation between individuals. These two type