The “Risky” Business of Relational Psychoanalysis
Dear friends and colleagues,
I hope this finds you well and, for those who celebrate, enjoying the holiday season, and maybe even some time off as the end of the year approaches. As I compose this letter, we are in the middle of finalizing the program for our annual conference, this time in Los Angeles, California. “Expanding Our Clinical Experiences: The Spoken, Unspoken and Unspeakable in Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy” will take place from June 18th to 21st, 2020. Conference Chairs Philip Ringstrom, Hazel Ipp and Ilene Philipson, along with their local conference committee and the IARPP International Conference Committee, have been hard at work planning a conference that will have as its goal maintaining a focus on clinical practice and theory. As usual we will be gathering a strong group of well-known relational thinkers along with newer voices, crossing generations, theories, perspectives and special interests within relational psychoanalysis.
As is often the case but even more so this year, we received many more excellent proposals than we will have room to accommodate, a “good problem” if ever there was one, even though we wish we could have accepted all of them. If you submitted a proposal and/or stipend application and haven’t yet heard back from the conference or stipends committee, you will be receiving word very shortly. We predict a large turnout with strong and diverse international representation at this conference, and I am very much looking forward to seeing many of you there.
In other news, I want to congratulate and thank our new Colloquium Chairs Cathy Hix and Amy Schwartz Cooney on completing their first and highly successful online Colloquium based on Mary-Joan Gerson’s paper, “Death of a Parent: Openings at an Ending” (Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2018, 15:3, 340-354). In my Colloquium post, I thanked them for making what I called a somewhat risky choice of paper. In response, one of our members posted that if by risk I meant that Gerson’s paper is highly personal and called for a much higher level of personal sharing than our Colloquium authors, panelists and community usually engage in, then she wanted to challenge me on my use of the word “risk.” Paraphrasing (and of course interpreting this member’s post through my own subjective filter), she posed the following: If as relationalists we only engage via theoretical musings and interpretations and not also by assuming and making active use of our subjectivity in the room, we are likely missing a key assumption of relational work.
Well, as I wrote in my second Colloquium post, of course I couldn’t agree more. In our relational (and probably especially “big R” Relational) perspective, the personal is always professional. Subjectivity is assumed and, for better and/or worse, is always deeply embedded in our work. I do believe, though, that as is often the case in psychoanalysis and life in general, we have here a “this and” rather than a “this or” situation. In other words, yes, this time our Colloquium article involved even more direct personal disclosure than usual on the part of the author and, perhaps not surprisingly, in participants’ responses. And yes, this style of personal reflection is consistent with what we relational practitioners believe is integral to our perspective. But this is precisely why yes, I still maintain that this paper was a risky choice. And I want to close my letter with a related but even larger point about this.
To some extent, as we certainly know, risk is an inherent part of the relational perspective. Working from the assumption that there are no hard and fast rules for how to conduct a treatment, that one size does not fit all, that the therapist can and never should be neutral or “well-analyzed” enough to avoid transference-countertransference pitfalls, enactments and so on, by definition increases our feelings of and actual risk. In other words, relational and other contemporary psychoanalytic practitioners run the risk of increased exposure, vulnerability, embarrassment, shame and the generalized insecurity of not always “knowing.” Lack of certainty and the assumption of subjectively-determined limits has of course complicated and deepened our work—on the whole for the better, we would probably all agree. But it seems to me that this greater risk, in ways too numerous to comprehensively list here, is sometimes deeply uncomfortable for all parties concerned and at times carries the potential not just for transformation and growth, but for negative consequences as well.
And so, we trade in risk in every relational (if not any) treatment. We incur risk when, in a 2000-member, incredibly diverse and international membership, we choose to meet in particular countries or take on certain conference themes, respond to some events around the world but not others, write and present brand new or (for Colloquia) published papers that are more or less personal or theory-based, form new committees like the Collective that will engage in topics or methods of operating that will endear some while alienating others. And the list goes on. So here’s to risk. As long as it’s taken on with consciously good intentions, respect for differences of opinion and interest levels and with an open mind, we often end up thriving, surviving and when things don’t go exactly as planned, able to repair. But of course those are ideas we might take up in future letters or other forums.
With warm regards and all best wishes for a happy, healthy, successful and peaceful 2020,
Steve
Steven Kuchuck, DSW
New York City
Email Steven Kuchuck