Founding Editor:
Stephen Mitchell
Editor Emeritus:
Lewis Aron
Series Editors:
Adrienne Harris
Steven Kuchuck
Eyal Rozmarin
The Relational Perspectives Book Series (RPBS) publishes books that grow out of or contribute to the relational tradition in contemporary psychoanalysis. The term relational psychoanalysis was first used by Greenberg and Mitchell to bridge the traditions of interpersonal relations, as developed within interpersonal psychoanalysis and object relations, as developed within contemporary British theory. But, under the seminal work of the late Stephen A. Mitchell, the term relational psychoanalysis grew and began to accrue to itself many other influences and developments. Various tributaries—interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, self psychology, empirical infancy research, feminism, queer theory, sociocultural studies and elements of contemporary Freudian and Kleinian thought—flow into this tradition, which understands relational configurations between self and others, both real and fantasied, as the primary subject of psychoanalytic investigation.
We refer to the relational tradition, rather than to a relational school, to highlight that we are identifying a trend, a tendency within contemporary psychoanalysis, not a more formally organized or coherent school or system of beliefs. Our use of the term relational signifies a dimension of theory and practice that has become salient across the wide spectrum of contemporary psychoanalysis. Now under the editorial supervision of Adrienne Harris, Steven Kuchuck and Eyal Rozmarin, the Relational Perspectives Book Series originated in 1990 under the editorial eye of the late Stephen A. Mitchell. Mitchell was the most prolific and influential of the originators of the relational tradition. Committed to dialogue among psychoanalysts, he abhorred the authoritarianism that dictated adherence to a rigid set of beliefs or technical restrictions. He championed open discussion, comparative and integrative approaches, and promoted new voices across the generations. Mitchell was later joined by the late Lewis Aron, also a visionary and influential writer, teacher and leading thinker in relational psychoanalysis.
Included in the Relational Perspectives Book Series are authors and works that come from within the relational tradition, those that extend and develop that tradition, and works that critique relational approaches or compare and contrast them with alternative points of view. The series includes our most distinguished senior psychoanalysts, along with younger contributors who bring fresh vision. Our aim is to enable a deepening of relational thinking while reaching across disciplinary and social boundaries in order to foster an inclusive and international literature.
By Rochelle G. K. Kainer
September 11, 2014
The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration is a rich and clinically detailed account of the therapeutic restoration of the self, and speaks to the healing process for analysts themselves that follows from Rochelle Kainer's sensitive integration of heretofore dissociated realms of ...
By Carlo Strenger
September 11, 2014
What can contemporary psychoanalysis bring to the understanding of Generation X, a cohort for whom the trivialization of a dizzying array of possible experiences teamed with the pressure to lead spectacular lives often leads to diffuse feelings of confusion, depression, and disorientation. ...
By Brent Willock
June 09, 2014
Finalist for the 2007 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship! This exceptionally practical and insightful new text explores the emerging field of comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. It provides an invaluable framework for approaching the currently fractious state of the ...
By Sheldon Bach
June 09, 2014
It is clinical work with the most difficult patients - those with severe narcissistic, sadomasochistic, and borderline disorders - that poses the greatest challenge to the therapist's guiding assumptions about clinical process; indeed, such work often leads therapists to question beliefs and ...
By Steven H. Cooper
June 09, 2014
Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In Objects of ...
By Danielle Knafo, Kenneth Feiner
June 09, 2014
What is the role of unconscious fantasies in psychological development, in psychopathology, and in the arts? In Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World, Danielle Knafo and Kenneth Feiner return to these interlinked questions with a specific goal in mind: a contemporary ...
Edited
By Robin A. Deutsch
May 07, 2014
For much of its history, psychoanalysis has been strangely silent about sudden ruptures in the analytic relationship and their immediate and far-reaching effects for those involved. Such issues of betrayal and abandonment – the death of an analyst, a patient’s suicide, an ethical violation – ...
By Paul L. Wachtel
April 17, 2014
Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self articulates in new ways the essential features and most recent extensions of Paul Wachtel's powerfully integrative theory of cyclical psychodynamics. Wachtel is widely regarded as the leading advocate for integrative thinking in personality theory and...
By Philip A. Ringstrom
March 12, 2014
Winner of the 2014 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship! A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy presents an original model of couples treatment integrating ideas from a host of authors in relational psychoanalysis. It also includes other ...
By Paul Williams
January 29, 2010
The "Director" controls Ms. B’s life. He flatters her, beguiles her, derides her. His instructions pervade each aspect of her life, including her analytic sessions, during which he suggests promiscuous and dangerous things for Ms. B to say and do, when he suspects that her isolated state is being ...
By Nancy Caro Hollander
July 01, 2010
In our post-9/11 environment, our sense of relative security and stability as privileged subjects living in the heart of Empire has been profoundly shaken. Hollander explores the forces that have brought us to this critical juncture, analyzing the role played by the neoliberal economic paradigm and...
By Stephen A. Mitchell
December 01, 2003
In his final contribution to the psychoanalytic literature published two months before his untimely death on December 21, 2000, the late Stephen A. Mitchell provided a brilliant synthesis of the interrelated ideas that hover around, and describe aspects of, the relational matrix of human experience...