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In his latest book, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst, Robert Grossmark embarks on an ambitious and well-executed endeavor of theoretical integration and clinical narrative that transcends historical divisions within the field of psychoanalysis. Grossmark assembles an intricate, yet accessible, conceptual framework that brings together contributions from Freud, Contemporary Freudians, and British Object Relational theorists and grounds it in the fundamental relational tenet that the psychotherapeutic endeavor is a two-person phenomenon. His capacity to find kindred spirits in a wide array of psychoanalytic schools of thought provides the reader a reprieve from the field’s historical tendency toward orthodoxy and division. Through descriptions of both individual analytic work with severely traumatized patients and group therapy work, Grossmark illustrates an innovative clinical approach grounded in a broad and sophisticated theoretical foundation.
Grossmark’s work offers us a quintessential example of how necessity truly is the mother of invention. This volume represents the culmination of many years of deeply engaged clinical steadfastness in the face of considerable challenges with difficult patients. While one can easily imagine that such clinical challenges could lead to a form of theoretical fixity, Grossmark instead develops and employs theoretical curiosity and flexibility to create an innovative and integrative model of contemporary practice that is likely to support and guide psychoanalysts from a wide range of theoretical backgrounds.
Central to Grossmark’s proposed framework is his revision of the Relational school’s emphasis on the use of explicit co-narration of the here-and-now interaction between therapist and patient. In alliance with the thinking of Winnicott, Balint, and Sheldon Bach, among others, Grossmark argues that many patients are not able to experience their subjectivity as coherent or continuous and instead live in a chronic state of frag