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The title of this book draws from a statement made by Hans Loewald: “Understanding [the patient] would seem to be an act that involves some sort of mutual engagement, a particular form of the meeting of minds.”1 Choosing Loewald's citation for an epigraph, the author presents a book about “relational” theory, a model incorporating a variety of theoretical persuasions in keeping with the delineation made by Greenberg and Mitchell2 and distinguished fundamentally from drive theory. Aron describes this distinction as reflecting two basically incompatible views of human nature-Man as an essentially individual animal versus Man as a social being. He writes:
Relational theory is based on the shift from the classical idea that it is the patient's mind that is being studied (where mind is thought to exist independently and autonomously within the boundaries of the individual) to the relational notion that mind is inherently dyadic, social, interactional, and interpersonal (p. x).
Aron argues strongly, and rather repetitively, in the course of