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Development has traditionally been equated with linear, sequential, universal movements through life stages. As psychoanalysis relinquishes its claims on the universal and the safe rationality of predictable sequences (see Mitchell, 1997), new metaphors of therapeutic development—connoting a process of healing, growth, and change—are needed. Moving from an exploration of the individual self to an emphasis on a more relational self requires a new look at how relatedness unfolds. We are proposing the idea of a developing dyad—the evolution of the analytic partnership—as one lens through which the analyst can envision the movement of therapy. We focus this lens on specific self psychological theoretical constructs: selfobject experience, rupture and repair, therapeutic impasse, and optimal responsiveness. Our purpose is to add our voice to those who posit an interactional dimension to self psychological psychoanalytic theory. We want both to preserve and expand the above-mentioned constructs, which we have found to have profound clinical efficacy.
The working assumptions that underlie our use of the lens of the developing dyad as a metaphor have been drawn from an amalgam of