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If you're inspired by the relational paradigm, this book will reward you. If you aren't so inspired, this book won't change your mind. Galit Atlas, PhD, a faculty member at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies as well as the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, together with the late Lewis Aron, PhD, previously the director of the NYU Postdoctoral Program, offer this overview of relational thinking. They draw upon an astonishing array of authors, including Ferenczi, Jung, Winnicott, Searles, McDougall, Grotstein, Benjamin, Ogden, D. Stern, Mitchell, Kohut, Sullivan, and field theorists Ferro and Civitarse. If this (incomplete) list seems incongruous, it may be one of the authors' points, namely that somehow everyone can be envisioned as falling within the relational scope. This even includes Sigmund Freud (whose thinking is cited intermittently, pp. 3-158, mostly as if congruent with relational thinking).
Relational thinking is based on a “two-person” psychology centered around “enactments” (p. 5). This book offers synonyms and appositives pertaining to the notion of an enactment, without actually defining it. Presumably, it refers to the therapist's prerogative, as one of the two “persons,” to introduce personal themes and dynamics into the treatment process. Relationalists do not consider this a countertransferential error, nor is it merely an accident or incident the therapist aims to neutralize by trying to “get out of it” (p. 13). A therapist's enactment is said to become “generative” by functioning as “a practicing for the future” (p. 15) and is thought to be beneficial for the patient in and of itself. This is because of the post-Bionic notion that “understanding” is secondary to “becoming” (p. 6). This view can hardly be wrong, and may help to explain why relational thinking claims to encompass such a wide scope. Even a classical construction focused on a patient's past is functioning to usher in a new future