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In Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Relevance, Dismissal and Self Definition, Arthur H. Feiner presents essays written by him in the 1990s. The volume comprises Feiner's intellectual and personal perspective on a lifetime engagement in the domain of the interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition, under the aegis of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute. In the book, Feiner elaborates on the writings of its founders, especially Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Clara Thompson.
In eight essays, loosely categorized under the headings of “The Patient and the Analyst,” Feiner provides his paradigm of the interpersonal psychoanalytic clinical engagement in clear and concise terms, employing the themes of “relevance, dismissal, and self definition.” It is through these three themes that Feiner explores the “interpersonal field” that guides him in his clinical engagements. In essence, it is his distillation of the complexities of psychoanalytic interaction, interpersonal style.
Referring to the patient's basic feelings of him/her self, Feiner states the following:
… without the conviction of relevance, without the feeling for mattering, no intimate way of relating is possible. With impactlessness comes a defensiveness against an assumed vulnerability. Even the likelihood of communal feeling tends to be banished from consciousness … the desire for relevance and mattering is the feeling expressed by patients who have been left with the idea that they have been diminished in the relationships with significant others. Their feelings, their desires, in essence, their rights to be who they are, have been made largely irrelevant. The inevitable behavior by others that accounted for this was a seeming dismissiveness that ultimately was absorbed as part of the patients' definitions of themselves which in turn affects how they function.… The experience of anger and rage, anxiety and depression follows a belief that one is impactless, that one has been dismissed