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most inchoate sense of self is buit upon the rhythm of sensation, particularly at the skin’s surface. It is difficult to capture in words. This mode reflects the rhythmicity of early relations with the nursing experience, of being held in the mother’s arms. It is a relationship of shape to the feeling of enclosure, of beat to the feeling of rhythm, of hardness to the feeling of edgedness. Sequences, symmetries, periodicity, skin-to-skin ‘molding’ are examples of contiguities that are the ingredients out of which the beginings of rudimentary self-experience arise” (Ogden, 1989, pp.30-31). The core contribution here is that the contiguity of surfaces generate an experience of a sensory surface, rather than a feeling of two surfaces coming together either in differentiating opposition or in merger. V. Bc. Relational Models Various relational models in the North American conceptual landscape have stressed analytic subjectivity, issues of gender and sexuality, trauma, early development and primitive states (Harris, 2011). Surveying the landscape, Harris states, that “while there are many strands, many influences, and many signal figures, … it is Mitchell (1988, 1993 a and b, 1997, 2000) who was … the catalyst, the writer and thinker…who launched this movement” (p. 704). V. Bca. Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell In their publication “Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory” (1983), Greenberg and Mitchell argue that the focal point of clinical psychoanalysis has always been the patient’s relationships with others. How do these relationships come about? How do they operate? How are they transformed? How are relationships with others to be understood within the framework of psychoanalytic theory? They argue that there have been two basic solutions to the problem of locating relationships within psychoanalytic theory: the drive model, in which relations with others are generated and shaped by the need for drive gratification; and various relational models, in which relationships themselves are taken as primary and irreducible. They trace the divergences and the interplay between the two models and the intricate strategies adopted by the major theorists in their efforts to position themselves with respect to these models. They demonstrate further that many of the controversies and fashions in diagnosis and psychoanalytic technique can be fully understood only in the context of the dialectic between the drive model and the relational models. The publication considered such diverse writers as Klein, Winnicott, Kernberg and Kohut, as joined in a commitment to the primacy of object ties and to the ‘relational’ experience. After 1983, Mitchell (1988, 1993,1997, 2000) further developed the relational perspective, considering metapsychological matters, clinical process, models of mind, and a dyadic flow of analytic work. In 1993, in his “Hope and Dread” publication, Mitchell outlined the relational revolution, with a small r: a revolution in “what the analyst knew (echoes of Lacan…) and a revolution in what the patient wanted (echoes of Ferenczi)” (Harris, 2011, p.
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