Editor's Epilogue

It has been a great privilege to serve as editor of this ground-breaking issue comprising a series of relational discussions on Holly Levenkron's compelling case of Ali, in which Levenkron illustrates a relational approach to therapeutic action. I believe this issue offers a unique contribution to our understanding of a relational sensibility. The contributors, all outstanding clinicians in their own right, present alternative views on some of the central organizing concepts inherent in this perspective, including, in no particular order, enactment, confrontation, self-revelation, meaning construction, conflict, negotiation, dissociation, intersubjectivity, recognition, authentic engagement, empathy, and Levenkron's own contribution to relational thought, affective honesty. The issue as a whole thus provides a compendium on relational understanding, complete with an embodiment of the tensions that exist among relationalists as they considered and addressed the same clinical material. As readers, we were able to view the variety of conflicting meanings, assumptions, and consequences of this still-emerging psychoanalytic frame.

In this necessarily short epilogue, I will dip into the discussions of our commentators to illustrate the how relational concepts are described in these contributions. Obviously I can do no more than sample these ideas; the richness of the discussions defies any complex codification of them here.

I'll be able to examine only a few of the relational constructs I listed above, then, and only randomly, considering confrontation, negotiation, intersubjectivity, self-disclosure, enactment, dissociation, and affective honesty, all featured by Holly Levenkron in her clinical material and viewed by her as vitally connected to the therapeutic change illustrated in her work with Ali.

Beginning with Phillip Bromberg, he asserts that in postclassical analytic work, the analyst doesn't avoid participating in the dyad but, rather, using