Summary of Kenneth Frank's “Toward Conceptualizing the Personal Relationship in Therapeutic Action: Beyond the ‘Real’ Relationship,” Which Appeared in Psychoanalytic Perspectives Volume 3, Number 1

In his paper, “Toward Conceptualizing The Personal Relationship In Therapeutic Action: Beyond The ‘Real’ Relationship,” Kenneth Frank reasoned that it is time that we said farewell to the concept of the real relationship and agreed upon a more current language to describe what is truly going on in terms of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, and what we actually do. The personal (or person-to-person) relationship accords well with recent relational theorizing, including such concepts as analyst-analysand “fit,” enactments, and implicit relational knowing, based on several areas of investigation. The personal relationship is thought to offer a fertile replacement for an anachronistic concept (the real relationship) that confuses epistemological and relational dimensions and that, although perhaps intuitively appealing, has lost theoretical viability and offers little to guide clinical practice. Frank reasoned that there is far greater theoretical coherence and clinical value in the concepts of the personal (person-to-person) and the new relationship than in the earlier concept of the “real” relationship. Within a contemporary analytic model, which emphasizes not “reality” but the quality and meaningfulness of personal and relational experience, this personal potential of the analytic relationship is crucial.

To develop his thesis, Frank traced the historical evolution of the concept of the “real” relationship, elucidating its disparate meanings throughout the literature and considering its other problematic features. Historically, dichotomous thinking was employed to determine whether the analysand saw the analyst as she “really is,” or as transferentially distorted. But the sense and meaning of the so-called real relationship that relationists have been concerned with is different; it is the patient's and analyst's subjective sense that something personally significant and emotionally meaningful and authentic is transpiring. Although the concept of