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III. C. Relational Perspectives and Self Psychology: Two Theoretical Streams Indigenous to North America
III. Ca. Relational Models of Unconscious Process Relational psychoanalysis began in the 1980s in the United States. Relational theory locates its ancestry, its DNA, in Ferenczi (1949), in Balint (1952) and object relations, and in the field theory derivatives brought by Heinz Racker (1957) to North America as well as the interpersonal school of Harry Stack Sullivan (1953). There are a number of implications from this multiply configured lineage. Unconscious experience/phenomena emerge in an intersubjective context , a bipersonal field, and a two-person interaction in which there is expectable unconscious transmission within the analytic dyad , within the system in which an individual is embedded. Inalienably and inevitably, this adds dimensions of uncertainty and ambiguity to experience. The origin and site of experiences are often impossible to ascertain. It must remain open within a clinical process to consider and reconsider whose unconscious is operating in any one person’s experience. Countertransference in this sense is always ambiguously induced and elicited: personal and dialogic, intrapsychic and intersubjective. With a strong interest in trauma and its sequelae in conscious and unconscious experience, the relational theory stresses more the presence and power of vertical splits than horizontal layering of levels of consciousness. Dissociation comes in varieties of splitting, from radically distinct and uncommunicative to relatively porous. Dissociation has been developed and deepened in the work of Philip Bromberg (1994, 1996) and includes splits in consciousness in the service of disavowing or pushing away toxic or traumatic content, whether emanating from inside or outside the individual. Bromberg also worked out an understanding of the way dissociation intersects with attachment, often outside awareness. The individual (including the quite young child) splits off and ‘forgets’ experiences that would put an attachment to a potent and needed figure at risk. Mental integration is, in a sense, sacrificed to tenuous ties to another person. Despite the potency of a bipersonal unconscious transmission , unconscious process has a status in the intrapsychic sphere. Here, the influence of object relations on relational theory is felt: the experience of internal worlds, internal objects living, dying, toxic or benign. The degree of awareness, the presence of splitting as a dominant form of mental functioning depends on a variety of factors, individual and external/interpersonal. Thus, a relational analyst might find it useful to think in terms of the presence of unconscious fantasies in the sense of significant relational patterns with particular, often unconscious meaning. One of the struggles and perhaps tensions in relational models of the unconscious is to posit a depth to surface. The intersubjective dimension of experience (dialogue, interaction) includes both conscious and unconscious bi-personal registers of experience. One of the key aspects of relational models of the unconscious is to elaborate unconscious phenomena in both internal and interpersonal experiences. This allows a more dialectical and less polarized account of the interplay between inside/outside; interpersonal and intrapsychic.
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