The Dignity in Multiplicity: Human Value as a Foundational Concept in Relational Thought

This paper explores the foundational status of the concept of human dignity in relational thought. The author highlights the importance of dignity in everyday clinical work, as well as the role this notion has played in inspiring what has been called the “relational turn” in psychoanalysis. Utilizing concepts from ethical theory and current analytic ideas regarding the multiplicity of self-states, the author sketches a model of psychic experience in which dignity plays a defining role. This model emphasizes the ongoing dialectic between dignity-based processes (in which Self and Other are experienced as unconditionally valuable) and processes in which we experience Self and Other as only conditionally valuable, or in many cases of pathology, unconditionally bad. A dignity-based vision of analytic process is proposed, wherein analyst and patient are engaged in the co-construction of an intersubjective space that is progressively more consistent with their intrinsic worth as human beings. It is suggested that, by explicitly affirming human dignity as an overarching value of relational thought, we would be encouraging continuous revision of our theories in order to further reflect the worth of the human subject, a process that could lead to more humane theories of analytic work.