Gregorio Kohon Roger Kennedy The Elusive Human Subject: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Subject Relations,  London: Free Association Books, 1998  226 pp. £15.95.

Roger Kennedy should be congratulated. Not only is he one of the most prolific psychoanalytic writers in England at present, but also one of the few who has tried to make sense of difficult ideas (like the theories developed by Jacques Lacan, which were more or less alien to British psychoanalysts at the time (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986)), or to incorporate philosophical arguments into his psychoanalytic enquiries, as he did in his previous book Freedom to Relate (1993). In fact, it was in this book that Kennedy announced his discontent with object-relations theory. He said: ‘The importance of object-relations theory is that it reveals … the way in which the subject relates to objects…. [This model] is another version of the Cartesian subject/object distinction … and it runs the risk of the kind of reification described by Habermas’ (1993: 71).

In Kennedy's view, object-relations theory describes an ‘isolated subject looking out at a world from which they are essentially divided’. He argues that this is a reductive theory, ‘explaining psychical phenomena too easily without accounting for the specifics of human encounters’. In his book he supports the idea of a ‘general human tendency for relatedness…. Object relations would be a secondary phenomenon of a special kind’ (1993: 71-2).

This dissatisfaction with the theory drew Kennedy to develop the ideas expressed in his new book. He takes the term Theory of Subject Relations from Christopher Bollas, who stated:

any psychoanalytic session is a dialectic between two subjectivities, and although they will form and project internal mental representations of one another, the understanding of which we term object relations theory, they will also act in a successional interplay of

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idiom elements, which I think we should say is more of a subject relations theory. (If the first one) attends to the formation and projection of self and object representations, (the second one) attends to the interplay of two human sensibilities.