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The organizers of the Toronto International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Conference (2015) attempted to explore the variations in theory, technique, and traditions that reflect different orientations within the broad relational paradigm, as well as the similarities that lead each of us, notwithstanding our differences, to identify ourselves as relational analysts. The final plenary of the conference, entitled “Beyond the Big Tent: Questioning and Expanding some Core Premises of our Relational Culture and Canon,” was charged with expanding the viewpoints implicit in the first four plenaries: that the most relevant critique, change, and creative expansion of the relational perspective should rightly spring from the diversity within its tradition. Several questions were proposed for consideration by the panelists, Francisco J. González, Juan Francisco Jordan-Moore, and Malcolm Owen Slavin, each of whom delivered a paper addressing different challenges to the relational perspective in its current state of being.
The questions posed were as follows:
Mitchell wrote that there was no aspect of psychic life that was “non-relational.” Do you differ from the idea that all aspects of interiority occur within an internalized object relational context?
What are the formative but essentially nonrelational aspects of psychic development you believe may have been either foreclosed or unexamined by relational analysts to date?
How does the inclusion of these aspects of psychic life potentiate new areas of analytic exploration for patient and analyst?
As rich as these views may be, does their inclusion threaten to stretch the vision so thinly that its intellectual containment and clinical power are inevitably compromised? Or not?
Beyond new languages and surface differences, what are their implications for our relational canon and culture?
Rather than invite formal discussants to comment on this rich panoply of ideas, we allow the papers to speak for themselv