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704). Later, through reconnecting with Loewald’s lens on early development, Mitchell began to attend to those aspects of relationality that emerge in earliest attachments.
V. Bcb. Basic Concepts of the Relational Thought
Among the basic concepts of various Relational Models are: 1. Two person psychologies: The idea that the mind emerges in the matrix of social relationships; the mind is interpersonal as well as individualized. Through the work of Ghent (1990, 2002), Winnicott’s dyadic view of transitional space and transitional objects became strong components of relational thought. For analysts-researchers like Beebe (Beebe and Lachman, 2005), Seligman (2003, 2005), and the Boston Change Process Study Group (Stern, Sandler, Nahum et al., 1998), these ideas flow from infant-parent observations. The infant observation studies established grounds for understanding of early relational life, with implications for clinical theory and technique of relational psychoanalysis, such as ‘mutual regulation’, ‘rupture and repair’, ‘heightened affective moments’ (Beebe and Lachman, 2005), and transformative properties of ‘now’ moments (Stern et al. 1998). Hoffman’s (1998) temporal dimension of the intersubjective and the intrapsychic, whereby the past is constructed along with the future along the lines of social construction of shared and individual realities; Benjamin’s (1988, 1995, 1998) work on complementarity, distinct kinds of thirdness, the dyad being always more than two-ness; and Donnel Stern’s (2010) recent ‘witnessing’ in clinical process, depicting the fragility, instability and uncertainty of boundaries within the interpersonal and relational context of ‘knowing one another’, are examples of the conceptual richness of the Two-Person psychologies coming out of the diverse Relational schools. 2. Social constructivism: Social regulation influenced by Fromm (1941) and Levenson (2006), is drawn from the interpersonalist tradition which regards culture as a major influence on the individual’s psyche. With respect to gender and sexuality, the insights of Foucault (1988) and Althusser (1970), have been influential. Contemporarily, in North America, Dimen (2003) and Goldner (1991, 2003) are among those who work in this tradition, focusing on the dialogue of the Unconscious and the Social, the body and the culture, in regard to psychoanalytic feminism and other culturally transformative themes. Corbett (1993, 2009), deconstructing masculinity, positions his work within both a relational and queer theory. 3. Multiple self-states: Relational metapsychology reflecting a preoccupation with states of identity and powered by dissociative process of varying intensity accounts for much of relational analytic dyadic work. ‘Hybridity’, ‘Multiplicity’, ‘Shifting self-states’, ‘vertical splits’ and ‘dissociations’ can be the signs of trauma as well as be part of normative models of mind (Bromberg, 1998, 2006; Davies and Frawley, 1994). In this vein, the early interest of Ferenczi (1911, 1932) in the unconscious communication of traumatic experiences, his concepts of identification with the aggressor and of the wise child, is continued in the present day by focus on trauma and its intergenerational transmission in speech, body, and in other ways of relating. Some of the contemporary relational work on embodiment in the context of problematic attachment (Gentile, 2006; Anderson, 2009; Seligman, 2009; Corbett, 2009) and
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