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Régine Waintrater is an associate professor in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Department of Psychoanalysis Studies of the University of Paris 7-Diderot. She wrote the introduction to the recently published French edition of Jessica Benjamin's Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995) and persuaded the French publisher of Freud (Payot) to publish Benjamin's book in France. Bonds of Love had already been translated in France without generating significant regard for Benjamin or for the Relational Psychoanalytic School. Indeed the very topic of this essay concerns what Waintrater refers to as misunderstandings and misconceptions about the relational movement in France amongst French psychoanalysts and its subsequent unpopularity there.
Relational psychoanalysis emerged as an American phenomenon and is not generally prominent in other parts of the world. There is no singular theory of relational psychoanalysis or its therapeutic action. Instead there are a number of schools of thought that are relational in nature going by various names such as ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘postmodernism perspective’, ‘contemporary psychoanalysis’, ‘intersubjectivist-relational’, or ‘constructivist’. In general, the relational movement is concerned with contextually based interactions with others and the impact of others on psychic development (Mills 2012). Additionally, experiential insight is preferred over its classical antecedents, which are seen as more cognitive. Relational perspectives have redefined or displaced many aspects of orthodox Freudian epistemology such as drive theory, the analyst's neutrality, authority and access to absolute truth claims and objective certainty, the patient's resistance, transference and admonitions against analyst self-disclosure (Mills 2012). The relational turn has opened up multi-disciplinary modes of discourse that address the plurality of human experience (and corresponding self states) and especially our views of otherness. These generative wor