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Alejandro Ávila Espada has brought together a rich and curious mix of essays from a group of writers on the forefront of relational psychoanalysis in Spain. This volume aims to articulate how the perspective of Mediterranean Spanish authors in particular has advanced and developed relational theory over the past two decades. The chapters showcase the questions, clinical and theoretical, that have been of central concern to these Spanish relational analysts and reveal how this perspective draws on a variety of sources that extend beyond the Iberian Peninsula.
Each chapter sets out to deepen a particular theme, though I found that the authors’ reach tended to be perhaps too extensive and at times overly inclusive of related topics. For this reason, I will report on what I felt was the gist of each chapter and will unfortunately have to leave out many of the directions, tangents, and doors left open for further consideration.
Ávila Espada contributes the first chapter, where he examines “roots, concepts, trends, and challenges” (p. 7) in relational analysis. Bringing together different strands of thought, he writes that relational thinking has been developed by analysts who have a “genuine interest in their patients’ needs” (p. 10) as opposed to subordinating them to the interest of research or inflexible theories or orthodoxies. These analysts understand co-creation to be a fundamental characteristic of the analytic interaction, with asymmetry appearing only in the ethical responsibility of the analyst. Relational analysts, he writes, give recognition to the fact that both participants are defined by the cultural, social, and ideological
context in which they are immersed, which in turn influences the analyst’s interventions, thus serving a function for these same contexts. Relational psychoanalysis breaks with the Cartesian tradition that trapped psychoanalysis, through its subsequent emphasis on the intrapsychic, into the idea of an “isolated mind” (p. 12) Alternat