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This is a remarkable, rich, and ambitious book. Wachtel aims to make contributions to critical or comparative psychoanalysis, to relational theory and practice, and to the broader field and the practice of psychotherapy. I believe he lives up to these expectations. The book is a critique of past and present thinking in psychoanalysis and the implication of various perspectives for clinical practice. He avoids jargons and generalizations and teaches us to be precise in analyzing our theoretical assumptions and their bearing on our therapeutic interaction with our patients. This is not about a “school of thought.” Wachtel embraces a relational point of view, which believes that people are embedded in a matrix of relationships, past and present, which continually shapes their development and behavior. Aspects of relational thinking was suggested early on in our history by Ferenczi and Rank, and later by Fairbairn, Winnicott, Sullivan, and much later by Kohut, as well as many others. Thus strands of relational thinking can be found in many different psychotherapeutic approaches.
The relational perspective found its first theoretical formulation when Michael Balint (1950) characterized the classic Freudian therapeutic model as a one-person model, while he favored a two-person model. The classic drive-based model believed in the neutrality of the therapist, while Balint believed that the analyst invariably influences the interaction. He was then only referring to the interaction in the therapeutic session. The phrase one- and two-person model gradually expanded to refer to relational thinking in general and not to a body count in the room. Wachtel would prefer to abandon this terminology, as the essence of relational thinking is about the importance of context: the context of another person, of family, of race, of the sociocultural situation, of work, and everyday activity. It is this essential contextual thinking that permeates this book. Wachtel emphasizes the cyclical c