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on the degree of flexibility and freedom of the field. Second, the degree of the field’s flexibility is defined by the range of relatedness available to the participants.
III. Abc. Intersubjectivity as a Central Dimension of Relational Psychoanalysis A Relational perspective in psychoanalysis began to emerge in the 1980s in the US, following the publication of the Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell (1983)’s “Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory”, which posed a relational/conflict model of the mind, as distinguished from a drive/conflict model. As relational theory developed, through a synthesis of a number of perspectives compatible with a relational/conflict model (American Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, Object Relations theories in their Kleinian and British Independent varieties, post Kohutian self psychologies with intersubjectivist emphases and others), the development and application of theories emphasizing the intersubjective dimension in psychoanalysis and development played a central role. Because relational psychoanalysis is a heterogeneous perspective, representing a variety of complementary syntheses and integrations within its broad perspective, different understandings, emphases and applications of intersubjectivity theory can be seen among analysts who are self identified as ‘relational.’ Attachment theorists, the Boston Change Process Group (BCPG) and Jessica Benjamin (2004), following Winnicott, have emphasized developmental aspects of intersubjectivity, the latter in particular stressing mutual recognition, rupture and repair, and an emphasis on ‘the third,’ in their theorizing (Benjamin, 1988, 1995, 2004, 2013). Theorists with roots in the Interpersonal tradition ( Stephen Mitchell, Anthony Bass, Phillip Bromberg, Donnel Stern and others) have emphasized the unique irreducible subjectivities that co-establish each dyad, with its particular transference/countertransference fields of experience and capabilities for exploring them and discerning their relative contributions to enactments and other forms of psychotherapeutic entanglement. Relationally informed analysts in particular emphasize the quality of bi-directionality in transference/countertransference field, including in enactments. From a relational, intersubjective point of view, it cannot be taken for granted, for example, whether an enactment or a projective identification can properly assumed to begin with either therapist or patient, without open minded joint inquiry into the currents of experience that co- establish the intersubjective field of experience which they generate. Patient and analyst, each with his or her own subjectivity, conscious and unconscious experience, engage each other with the full range of resources and limitations, blind spots, insights, which they can bring to bear in the therapy. Relational theory, fundamentally intersubjectivistic in its point of view, attempts to come to terms with the implications of this perspective for analytic work. Relational theory and technique has strongly emphasized the subjectivity of both participants in the process. Relational analytic therapies have focused on the contribution of the analyst’s subjectivity to the process, and how the patient experiences that contribution. It emphasizes as well how the analyst becomes implicated in enactments that reveal to the patient and analyst dissociated parts of their experience that had not been accessible prior to the recognition and working through of such enactments (Bromberg, 1998, 2006; Aron, 1996; Bass, 2003, Benjamin, 2004,
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