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The writers of this issue grapple with the sources of a new status quo in psychoanalysis, one in which relationality, however one defines the term exactly, has replaced reality as a condition of being and as an endpoint of understanding. Each writes a how-so story of this status quo. The challenge for each author has been to relationalize the relational point of view, which has become less a point of view than an atmosphere.
I see roughly two modes in which the writers in this issue grapple with their task. The first is an autobiographical/philosophical mode, in which the author looks back to a time when he/she struggled with established classical (or interpersonal) ideas to arrive at a more relational sensibility. Stolorow, Stern, and McKay by way of Jessica Benjamin, operate predominantly in this mode. The emphasis is on the author’s own changing experience as he/she engages with patients and experiments with new relational frameworks to explain unique happenings. The second is a sociopolitical mode, in which the author considers forces in the culture that shaped the new outlook or made it conceivable. This group is further divided roughly into those who see relationality as an emancipatory response to oppressive hegemonic cultural influences (Harris, Seligman), for whom Foucault is as important a forebear as Sullivan or Kohut, and those who see relationality as emerging from new creative tendrils in new subcultures (Weisel-Barth).
Christina Emanuel steps outside the constraints of the issue to consider the relational turn from the perspective of one who never felt it as a turn. For Emanuel, the turn, which most of the authors in this issue experienced as a skeptical questioning of authority, has become an authoritative way that, itself, discourages questioning simply by having rendered most of its old adversaries irrelevant. Skepticism needs an establishment to press up against. In the end, Emanuel’s critique of the relational tradition squares with the self-questi