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It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on this stimulating and importantly clarifying paper. As Frank makes abundantly clear, the concept of the real relationship, though initially itself an effort at clarification—a valuable and important one, indeed—nonetheless became over time a source of confusion in its own right. In an impressively scholarly fashion, Frank highlights and details the many, often contradictory, ways that the concept has been used in the psychoanalytic literature, and shows how confusions have thereby arisen. He offers us, as an alternative, the concept of the “personal” relationship, and argues clearly and forcefully for why he views this alternative as superior.
One of the many interesting points that Frank makes is that the term “real relationship” appears so regularly in the literature in quotation marks. This strikes me as an important observation—indeed, precisely the kind of observation that a skilled psychoanalytic clinician makes, a noticing of a small but meaningful oddity that the patient (or in this case, the psychoanalytic writer) largely overlooks or ignores. That is, what Frank is highlighting is not that there is an explicit, discussed and agreed upon tradition of putting the term in quotation marks, but rather, that insecurities about the exact meaning and about the very legitimacy of the idea lead to the compromise formation, as it were, of quotation marks.
Stimulated by this observation of Frank's, it occurs to me to suggest that there is another important tell-tale sign of insecurity with our formulations to which we should also be alert and that also appears with some regularity in the psychoanalytic literature, as well as in oral presentations