1 Why Now?: a Social-Historical Inquiry Into the Ascent of Relational
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Why Now?: A Social-Historical Inquiry Into the Ascent of Relational Theory Ilene Philipson, PhD, PhD Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis In a recent issue of the IARPP Newsletter (Vol. 8, No. 1), IARPP President Jeremy Safran writes that “the development of relational analysis was initially influenced by many factors that are particularly American: for example a sense of optimism, individualism, a tendency to challenge social hierarchy and the type of pluralistic perspective associated with the tradition of American philosophical pragmatism” (p. 12). While undoubtedly there is truth to this assertion, I think Safran’s analysis serves as a good example of what Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has noted as the lack of historicity in psychoanalysis, that is, our lack of reflection upon the historical changes in our field (2009). By tying the development of relational psychoanalysis to a fixed and uniform notion of American character, Safran inserts a timeless quality to what I see as a highly dynamic history, and a recent, rather sudden paradigm shift in psychoanalytic thought and practice. If relational analysis is an expression of American character, why did it emerge in the 1980s and not before? Where did the particularly American tendency to challenge social hierarchy reside during the seven decades of classical Freudian hegemony in this country? And why until only recently did our psychoanalytic institutes reject any kind of pluralism associated with the tradition of American philosophical pragmatism? Safran’s linking of American character to changes in theory stands out because we typically connect the rise of the relational model only to the development of ideas and the work of particular theorists. An excellent and parsimonious example of this general way of thinking is Stephen Mitchell and Lew Aron’s preface to Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition. In that edited volume they state that “[o]ver the past two decades, a distinctly new tradition, generally associated with the term relational psychoanalysis has emerged within American psychoanalysis through a convergence of a number of important factors.” They delineate those factors as interpersonal psychoanalysis (Sullivan, Fromm and Thompson); object relations theory (Guntrip, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Bowlby); self psychology (Kohut), and “[f]inally, . a distinctly American brand of psychoanalytic feminism” (Dinnerstein, Chodorow, Gilligan, Benjamin, Goldner, Harris and Dimen) (1999, pp. x-xi). Thus it is exclusively the work of individual minds that accounts for the emergence of the relational model as Mitchell and Aron see it. 1 What has interested me for a long time (see Philipson, 1993) is that so many of the ideas and theorists who are credited with the development of relational thinking have existed in the psychoanalytic canon for decades (cf Fairbairn, Guntrip, Winnicott, Bowlby, Sullivan), but it is not until 1983 that Greenberg and Mitchell denote a “relational model” as such. It is in Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, that, according to Aron and Harris: “relational theory was a description of a group of theorists who had neither defined themselves as relational nor seen their own work as related to that of others or to any movement or trend that would later be regarded as relational. It was only Greenberg and Mitchell, as historians and scholars of the development of psychoanalytic theory, who categorized them retrospectively as belonging to the relational turn in psychoanalysis” (2005, p. xv). What I am interested in examining in this article is the issue of what allowed Greenberg and Mitchell to make these connections, to create this new category of “the relational.” What space had opened up historically allowing them to see something previously unseen? And, crucially, why did their new category, and Mitchell’s subsequent elaboration of the relational turn (1988), capture clinicians’ attention? Clearly without these ideas finding resonance among psychodynamic practitioners, the name Stephen Mitchell could have remained part of the large pantheon of extremely bright and relatively obscure psychoanalytic writers. This dimension, the psychoanalytic audience that co-constructs theory through being drawn to certain authors and ideas and not others, is largely overlooked when we think about paradigm shifts. As intersubjectivists or contextualists, I think it should be impossible for us to look at the history of ideas without looking at the audience for those ideas, the question of why those ideas become salient at a particular point in time for a particular group of people. The material realities of which books and journals are purchased and which conferences and seminars are attended, shape theoretical shifts. In keeping with this understanding, we can contemplate the question of why Mitchell’s---and Kohut’s, and Winnicott’s, and Bowlby’s---ideas have such impact, speak with such force and seem so true starting in the 1980s and 90s. Too often I think we answer this question with the belief that these ideas are, well, simply better than what came before. After all they reject ahistoric drives, or are anti-Cartesian, or see people as fundamentally object seeking, or constituted by a lifelong need for selfobjects, or attachment, or mutual recognition, etc. But this way of thinking begs the question. Why now, at this particular historical moment, do we think that these ideas are better? If we take seriously our rejection of objective truths, how do we end up claiming that relational thinking is better than classical? Greenberg and Mitchell tell us that “the evaluation of psychoanalytic theories is a matter of personal choice. The theory stands or falls on how compelling it appears to be, on its underlying vision of human life. Does the theory speak to you? Does it seem to account for your deepest needs, longings, fears? In your clinical work does it provide a 2 convincing account of your patients which corresponds with your own experience of them? (1983, p. 407).” I would argue that this view may tell us something about how individuals evaluate theory for themselves or why there might be differences among us at any one point in time, but it does not address the issue of why there are historical shifts in our theoretical understanding, why certain ideas become salient and even hegemonic, and, most importantly, why our collective “underlying vision of human life” seems to have changed. Further, Greenberg and Mitchell’s emphasis on “personal choice” does not take into account the social-historical construction of what we experience as free choice. A more hermeneutic or social-constructivist perspective holds that while “we are constituted by our self-interpretations, for the most part, these interpretations are not freely chosen or consciously recognized, since they are so deeply embedded in culture, history, and bodily being, and since they are so pervasive as to be nearly invisible. One implication of this is that self- understanding cannot be obtained by studying individual subjectivity alone; it requires an understanding of culture, of language and of history” (Woolfolk, et al, 1988, p. 16). Ingredient in the relational paradigm is a commitment to seeing people as embedded in contexts that they both shape and are shaped by. The idea of an isolated mind or encapsulated self that exists outside of an intersubjective field belongs to a Cartesian, modernist myth of autonomy. While applying such postmodern thinking to the relationship between analyst and patient is taken for granted by relationalists, rarely is such consideration brought to bear in understanding how the contexts of our therapeutic practice shape our ideas and theories In what follows I would like to offer some ideas as to why relational psychoanalysis and its underlying vision of human life have ascended since the 1980s. As a sociologist, I ground these ideas in the specific socio-historic context in which we practice. And as a contemporary psychoanalytic clinician, I view theory as socially constructed through the interplay between theorist and audience. Ideas do not fall from the sky; they are fashioned out of the day-to-day clinical work of practitioners who buy the books, read the articles and attend the conferences that allow certain theories to flourish and others to die. There are, of course, a multiplicity of ways to understand the relational turn.* For the purposes of this article, I would like to focus in on two specific transformations in our clinical practice that I believe dialectically inform the creation of relational theory. If we believe our contemporary theories are somehow better than what came before, I argue that they are so perceived, to some degree, because they offer a * For the best, and one of the only overviews of the development of relational theory that takes into account its social and historical contexts see Lewis Aron’s A Meeting of Minds (1996), chpt. 1. 3 better fit with the conditions of our contemporary practice and hence with the needs and interests of the current psychoanalytic audience. The Demise of Psychoanalytic Authority Over the course of the past three decades, psychoanalytic practice has been undergoing a process of feminization, decreasing status and remuneration, and increased competition. Besieged by managed care, the escalating influence of pharmaceutical interventions, and quick fixes such as EMDR, the world of psychoanalysis has responded, however inadvertently, by graduating increasing numbers of practitioners who find themselves with no one seeking their psychoanalytic services. In one of the few empirical studies of actual psychoanalytic practice, Sabrina Cherry and her colleagues discovered that very few analytic graduates actually practice psychoanalysis: “We found that in New York City, at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, strikingly little four-times-weekly psychoanalysis is being conducted among analysts who graduated within the last fifteen years. Graduates who . .have not become training analysts (78% of our sample) conduct almost no four-times-weekly analysis once their control cases terminate.