You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Responding to these three commentaries is Hardly A neu tral task. I have decided to begin with the one that is most negative toward me and my work, Stephen Hartman's, and then to proceed on to one that is far more constructive, Christopher Bonovitz's. My last re ply is addressed to Joyce Slochower's commentary, because hers is most in keeping with a major aim of my paper: It provides space for respectfully building bridges between and among multiple psychoanalytic perspectives. When appropriate, I refer back to my earlier responses as I move on to the last.
In all three replies, I use the term Relational, with ac apital R, to refer to Relational Theory or the Relational School of psychoanalysis. I use the term relational, with a lowercase r, to refer to a relational perspective or point of view that may be held by various analysts from various schools, including many contemporary Freudians whose work is informed by this perspective. I aim to explicate these differences gradually and contextually as I move along.
Hartman's basic assumption, which underlies his fundamentally negative and often disrespectful criticism of my ideas, is that there is not room for co existence between or shifting back and forth or for building bridges between and among psychoanalytic paradigms. He believes that Relational theory has already replaced the traditional models simply because it has, and that is that. I have spent the last 35 years of my life advocating for pluralism, di versity, multiple models, and other forms of multiplicity, in an attempt to reconcile and work with the best that all psychoanalytic schools have to offer.