Interview by Christina Emanuel (USA)

Christina Emanuel:  Congratulations, Steve, on your election to the presidency of IARPP.  We are enormously grateful for your leadership and service.  I’m wondering if you could share a bit about how you came to be involved with IARPP.

Steve Kuchuck:  Thank you, Christina.  I’m excited for this new opportunity!  In my mind, my professional life is divided into two spheres, before IARPP and after.  It’s sometimes difficult to remember the former, I think not so much because of how long I’ve been part of the organization, but rather because of the huge impact relational psychoanalysis—and therefore IARPP—has had on me.

At any rate, I’ve been attending our North American and international conferences from as early as 2002, I believe.  My more direct involvement with the organization came when then-president Spyros Orfanos (USA) invited me to co-chair the online colloquium series with my colleague and dear friend Galit Atlas (USA).  When our term was completed, I showed questionable judgment by telling Spyros—even though mostly tongue in cheek—that I missed the added flow of emails from people posting and between Galit and me as we communicated behind the scenes, composed our own posts, stayed in touch with the authors and panelists, and so on.  Spyros, ever vigilant, invited me to begin moderating the membership listserv, which provided a new way to become even more involved with IARPP.  Several years ago I accepted a nomination to run for the board of directors and that has allowed a further opportunity to contribute to our organization.

CE:  As you begin your term as President of IARPP, what goals are most important to you?  And what challenges do you anticipate?  

SK:  First let me say that I inherited this position from a particularly strong and active president. As president-elect, I had the pleasure of learning my current job from Chana Ullman (Israel).  As president, I continue to benefit from her wisdom and devotion to the organization in her new role as past president. Additionally, our board and executive committee are made up of colleagues and friends who are experienced, hands-on, and passionate in their commitment to the organization, as are our executive director Val Ghent and administrators Elisa Zazzera and Lucia Lezama.  It does in fact take a village, as the saying goes, to run this organization. I see my role as overseeing and problem-solving in an already well-functioning but complicated system.  Very fortunately, this is a board (and I believe membership) that are also open to new ideas and programs.

One of my goals is to support and expand the membership committee that Chana initiated with Tony Bass (USA) and Sharon Beiman (Israel) as co-chairs.  Tony and Sharon are doing wonderful work organizing programs for IARPP members, primarily in countries that do not yet have chapters.  When we become aware that senior IARPP members will be traveling outside of their countries and are open to presenting their work while abroad, Tony and Sharon try to match them with chapters or individual members who have requested such visits.  This has become a way to support and grow our international chapters and to bring relational psychoanalysis to parts of the world where IARPP chapters do not yet exist but might one day form.  I am also committed to supporting and expanding the scope of our new committees, Psychoanalysis and the Collective, chaired by Eyal Rozmarin (USA) and Victór Doñas (Chile), and Relational Voices, chaired by Susi Nebbiosi (Italy).

In response to numerous requests from our members who are not fluent English speakers and readers, I am beginning an initiative that will be part of the membership committee to organize a network of member volunteers to help us translate the online colloquium papers into languages other than English.  This is obviously a complicated and labor-intensive task, but as an international organization with more than 12 international chapters either already established or in formation and members throughout the world who speak dozens of languages, one of my central goals is to do whatever I can to increase translations online, at conferences, and in webinars and other programing, therefore improving communication among our members.

There are infrastructure issues that I will be addressing as well, such as updating and improving the functionality of our website, forming a North American Conference Committee similar to our longstanding and very successful International Conference Committee, and reconstituting a finance committee to help us better manage our growing organization, overall budget, and increased scholarship and fellowship support.  Our goal has been—and continues to be—to support our members in as many ways as we can, including financially when that is necessary in order for them to travel to our conferences, present their work, and learn more about relational psychoanalysis.

CE:  You are located in New York City, the first home of the relational psychoanalytic movement, although one that increasingly is global.  What are your observations about relational psychoanalysis as its influence grows theoretically and geographically?  

SK:  I think that we are all excited to see how much relational psychoanalysis has spread throughout the world, and I am certain that this is due not only to the proliferation of relational writing, journals, books, and training programs, among numerous other factors, but also to the growth and continued influence of IARPP. As former co-chair (with Marianne Kennedy) of the International Chapters Committee (formerly called the Local Chapters Committee), I know firsthand how excited new members are when they discover our organization and the opportunities it provides for study and learning.  In some parts of the country and world, we are almost, if not quite yet, “mainstream.”

But regardless of where it is being taught, studied, or practiced, relational psychoanalysis is continually evolving.  I think because our reach is so much greater now than it was in the earlier years of this discipline and our organization, it can be easy to forget that for many psychoanalytic practitioners and students, this is still a relatively new way of working and quite far from being mainstream.  When I present outside of larger urban areas—or even to certain more traditional groups here in New York City and elsewhere—I’m reminded that relational psychoanalysis is still experienced by many clinicians as new and even revolutionary.  And for those of us who were trained more classically—or who have internalized teachers, supervisors and analysts who were—there might still be something new and likely often invigorating about working within a perspective that privileges the unique intersubjective fit that shifts frequently over time within and across treatments.

The pace of our international growth is one of the things that I find so exciting about IARPP.  Because relational psychoanalysis focuses on environmental and socio-cultural—including political—factors, I do believe that our members are well-situated to learn a great deal from each other based in large part on the cultural and general diversity of our membership.

Jody Davies once said—and Adrienne Harris speaks to this as well—that relational analysts are immigrants from other theoretical lands (I am likely paraphrasing here).  All of the first generation relational analysts and many from subsequent generations come from classical, object relations and other theoretical backgrounds.  It is only within the very recent past that some clinicians are being trained almost entirely within a relational context and training program.  When there is no “book to throw away” (à la Irwin Hoffman, of course) or theories to incorporate (I still see relational psychoanalysis as being closer to a perspective/turn as Steve Mitchell and his colleagues envisioned it rather than a unified theory, though this can be argued), it becomes important to examine what might be gained or lost as we educate future therapists and analysts.

CE:  What did your clinical training like?  Specifically, was relational psychoanalysis something you arrived at after having been trained in other traditions, or was it always an influence?

SK:  My institute training was strictly classical and as was the case in those days, heavily influenced by American ego psychology.  I was fortunate to have some exposure to British object relations theory before an attempt at its more formal inclusion led the first institute I studied at to split into two different institutes.   Later, I studied this further in private supervision and seminars.  But it wasn’t until I became part of a group called Psychotherapists for Social Responsibility formed to address issues of simultaneous trauma that psychotherapists and their patients here in NYC were facing in the aftermath of 9/11, that I met leading relational thinkers and became more exposed to this way of working.  I engaged in my own course of reading and study and, when I graduated from my second training institute, I proposed and then developed and taught their first courses on relational psychoanalysis.  This was how I really learned this perspective and of course those of you who teach realize that teaching is often the best way to learn something.

CE:  Not that you have any free time beyond clinical work and your commitment to IARPP, I’m wondering what other projects or activities you are engaged with now?

SK:  For various  reasons, not having free time doesn’t always stop me from pursuing multiple projects [laughs].  I love the opportunities our field provides for those interested in stretching beyond the treatment room.  I find that the balance between clinical and “outside” work is an important one for me.  In addition to my full-time private practice, I edit the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives, co-edit the Relational Perspectives Book Series for Routledge (with Lew Aron, Adrienne Harris and Eyal Rozmarin) and, when time allows, I teach.  I serve on the board of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) where I also co-direct the curriculum committee for the adult psychoanalytic training program.  Most recently, I am writing a book about the analyst’s subjectivity, and co-editing (with Linda Hopkins) a volume of Masud Khan’s workbooks and diaries.   

CE:  Thank you, Steve, for participating in this interview and letting our IARPP community get to know you! 

SK:  Thank you for the opportunity, Christina, and for your excellent work on eNews!

Steven Kuchuck, DSW
Email Steven Kuchuck