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With Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, and Attachment, Stephen Seligman has given us the gift of what we should call psychoanalytic thinking in the grand style. Rather than focusing on any one particular concept, theorist, or clinical approach, Seligman surveys a staggering amount of analytic and interdisciplinary literature to synthesize a new register for analytic thinking and practice: what he calls, relational-developmental psychoanalysis. The author provides not merely an amalgam of current perspectives in relational psychoanalysis and developmental psychology but also a broad overview of the Anglo-American field and how the rejection of a biologistic reading of Freud, coupled with an openness to developmental and attachment theory previously shunned by the clinical mainstream, and culminates in a new and empirically grounded understanding of the relationship between mind and environment. Beneath its rigorously academic surface, the book is as much an effort to outline a scientific theory of relational, developmental processes as it is a story about the development of psychoanalysis itself and why the discipline considered as a form of natural science inherently tends toward shedding the reductive illusions of its past and embracing the complexity of its true object. Dialectical in its approach, Relationships in Development proceeds by synthesizing the insights of a socially conscious intersubjective orientation with the laboratory-tested observations of infancy and attachment research to arrive at a position that is genuinely breathtaking in the scope and depth of its scholarship.
As a critical reader, I found myself attuned to those details that the author either omits or glosses over too quickly in constructing his narrative and in advancing his argument. This may have to do more with my own preoccupations than with any shortcomings of the text itself because, much to his credit, Seligman wants to do far more than preach to the convert