Relational Psychoanalysis

Relational psychoanalysis emphasizes that our relations with others are the essential stuff of human experience. Founding member of the relational school, Stephen A. Mitchell, says, “We are composed of the relationships of our earliest attachments” (1988, p. 21).  Rather than positioning the mind as solely an individual, drive-based system, relational theories redefine the mind as fundamentally formed and continually shaped by interpersonal experiences. Relational psychoanalysis thus shifts from a one-person model—where an objective, neutral analyst works on the patient’s intrapsychic conflict—to a ‘two-person’ framework in which “the patient-analyst relationship is continually established and reestablished through ongoing mutual influence” (Aron, 1991, p. 33).

Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

Relational psychoanalysis begins with the premise that it “recognizes the importance and value of understanding how two people and two psyches are always interacting with one another in any clinical situation” (Berzoff, p. 152). In classical psychoanalysis, transference typically meant the patient’s unconscious displacement of feelings onto a neutral analyst. Relational theorists assert that the analyst’s subjectivity—personal history, emotional reactions, and cultural frameworks—also shapes the therapeutic clinical endeavor. The notion of analytic abstinence is still a pivotal part of relational theory, but ‘true neutrality’ has been debunked as a myth.  

In classical models, countertransference was regarded as the analyst’s failing—an impediment to be minimized or avoided. Over time, “Contemporary theorists are more inclined to take a ‘totalistic’ approach to countertransference and view it as reflecting all of the analyst’s emotional responses to the patient and therefore useful as a clinical tool” (Aron, 1991, p. 32). The analyst’s emotional reactions are thus recognized as valuable data about the patient’s internal world and the emergent relational dynamics in the dyad. Lewis Aron further stresses that “thinking of the analyst’s experience as ‘counter’ to the patient’s transference encourages the belief that the analyst’s experience is reactive rather than subjective” (p. 33). In a relational psychoanalytic view, we move beyond seeing the analyst as simply reactive to the patient’s transference. Instead, we acknowledge that the patient and analyst’s subjectivities shape each clinical moment. This continual co-creation of the analytic dyad is known as intersubjectivity in the relational literature (Benjamin, 2018).

Projective Identification and Enactment

Building on the British Object Relations school, relational theory borrows the notion that projective identification processes “are relational communications because they are unconscious, but they also shape the interaction between practitioner and client” (Berzoff, p. 154). This is a non-pathologizing view of projective identification as a form of unconscious emotional communication that can be metabolized by the analyst and used to understand the unconscious psychic reality of the patient through trial identifications.

Enactment is another essential aspect of relational psychoanalytic theory and practice. Enactment itself rests on the foundation of intersubjectivity, which takes seriously that there are two individual subjectivities—constantly influencing each other—in the room at any given moment. Through enactments, the relational unconscious can be glimpsed within the analytic relationship.  In this view, the mind comprises internalized object relations—internalized representations and relations with the people in our lives—and these internalized object relations are inevitably enacted within our present relationships. The relational school’s conception of psychodynamics follows that “the central dynamic struggle throughout life is between the powerful need to establish, maintain, and protect intimate bonds with others and various efforts to escape the pains and dangers of those bonds...” (Mitchell, 1988, p. 29).

Relational Informative Experiences

Rupture and repair cycles within the therapeutic dyad serve as the crucible for transformative experiences in relational psychoanalysis. This sets the stage for the emergence of what Judith Chused (1996) calls informative experiences. The work of repair becomes more than a return to relational homeostasis; it becomes a process of symbolization, an opportunity for something new to be metabolized within the relational field. As Chused notes, these moments—whether spoken or enacted—can “communicate aspects of the transference that are not yet accessible to language” (p. 690), allowing the patient to experience and organize previously dissociated states.

Informative experiences often arise through or immediately after moments of rupture when the analytic pair moves through misunderstanding, conflict, or misattunement into a space of emergent understanding. This movement is not linear or clean. It is often murky, ambiguous, and emotionally raw, requiring the analyst’s tolerance of uncertainty and a capacity to hold affective complexity without rushing to closure. When these ruptures are held—not solved—within the container of the analytic relationship, they may become lived interpretations. These affectively encoded experiences return something essential to the patient’s inner world. Unlike classical interpretations, which aim to name unconscious content, informative experiences work at the level of procedural knowing. They are not offered as declarative insights but felt and internalized as shifts in the relational field, often accompanied by a sense that something deeply true has occurred, even if it cannot be fully put into words.

In my work, the most meaningful therapeutic shifts do not follow my most elegant interpretations but emerge from moments when something between us breaks and is explored and reconstituted in a new form. These are the places where the transference intensifies and takes on life. When that life is witnessed, survived, and thought about together, the patient often begins to experience themselves and their internal world differently. As I will later show in my case material, these moments—marked by rupture, repair, and surprising clarity or depth—constitute the heart of analytic action, not as insight delivered but as understanding lived.

References

Aron, L. (1991). The patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(1), 29–51.

Berzoff, J. (Ed.). (2011). Inside out and outside in: Psychodynamic clinical theory and psychopathology in contemporary multicultural contexts (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.

Benjamin, J. (2018). Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third. Routledge.

Chused, J. F. (1996). The therapeutic action of psychoanalysis: Abstinence and informative experiences. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44(3), 645–682.

Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Harvard University Press.