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Freud imagined the human animal as originating in an autistic, isolated phase and moving to a more mature phase of relations to others. In his second-to-last book, Mitchell (2014) reversed the equation. “Human minds are fundamentally social phenomena,” he wrote, “that become focalized and secondarily elaborated by individuals” (p. xii). He used the word relationality throughout this book and even crowned the book with that title. This turning of the adjective relational into the abstract noun relationality is a telling feature of the relational movement in the new millennium. Fairburn’s (1952) famous, tentative notion that “libido is object seeking” (p. 78) has turned into an all-encompassing credo. We don’t just behave in relation to others: The world we live in is suffused with the quality of such relating. Relationality, as with Freud’s reality, is the very condition of being human, our initial and forever state of nature, what we get to when the veils fall from our eyes. This is a gigantic shift from the disengaged stance favored by post-enlightenment thinkers from Descartes to Darwin to Freud, philosophers who offered, as Nagel (1986) put it, “a view from nowhere.” For most contemporary psychoanalysts, Freud’s vaunted reality and our emotional transactions with those closest to us can never be fully disambiguated, hence the need for a new word that describes both conditions simultaneously.
The idea that the theater of operations in psychoanalysis is constituted by two mutually influencing minds, as opposed to one mind observed by a neutral cognitive apparatus, has become not just acceptable, but axiomatic. It was not always so. Kohut and Sullivan, who tilled the soil from opposite ends of the field, developed their ideas in exile from mainstream institutes. Mitchell, Ghent, and Bass started Psychoanalytic Dialogues as a way to disseminate relational ideas considered too heretical for mainstream publications. Psychoanalytic Dialogues is currently the most widely