Object Relations and Social Relations: The Implications of theRelational Turn in Psychoanalysis

edited by Simon Clarke, Herbert Hahn and Paul HoggettKarnac, London, 2008; 210 pp; £21.99

This book represents an important and positive challenge to mainstreamclinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It sits within along tradition of work, reaching back to Freud himself, concerned with thesocial engagement of psychoanalysis and the contribution of psychoanalysisto social engagement. Many of the authors are experienced psychoanalyticclinicians, all of them know their theory intimately, and each has a distinc-tive history or sphere of engagement that informs their thinking on aspectrum encompassing clinical work, research, organizational consultancy,front line welfare and teaching. The collection’s epicentre is the innovativeprogramme of work led by Paul Hoggett at the University of the West ofEngland, which is part of a growing network of centres for psychoanaly-tically informed ‘psychosocial studies’ in the UK. One point of origin forthis work lies in the Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conferences ofthe 1990s, hosted at the University of East London, where psychosocialstudies also still flourish. These were marvellously creative events thathelped revitalize a socially radical spirit in British psychoanalysis.

What is the intellectual project at the heart of this book? In her chapteron ‘Artistic Output as Intersubjective Third’, Lynn Froggett explores somepractices associated with ‘restorative justice’ and refers to one of its aims asseeking ‘‘to restore a sense of connection between victim and offender inwhich both parties acknowledge themselves to belong to the same moralcommunity’’ (p. 89). A sustained critique of psychoanalytic practice andtheory that overtly or covertly render patient and analyst as members ofdifferent ‘moral communities’ is one organizing theme of the collection. Invarious ways the ‘relational turn’ in psychoanalysis is posited as a solutionto the tendency of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis to assume ‘masternarrative’ status for their theories, practices and clinical discourses. Ofcourse, psychotherapy is much more than just a moral or ethical endeavour.The book’s project reflects this amply, constantly weaving its argumentsfrom among a variety of experiential and discursive levels of analysis. But isits core critical endeavour valid, or does it to some degree mirror the projec-tive social and clinical dynamics it seeks to identify in the practices andtheories of others?

In her discussion of the importance of relational thinking for psychoana-lytic research into the formation of personal identity, Wendy Hollway offersa succinct and careful account of the ontological, epistemological andmethodological precepts informing relational psychoanalysis, and themanner in which these imply a distinctive clinical, social and political ethics.Her analysis is deepened via detailed extracts from the records of psychoan-alytically trained researchers who undertook observations of the mothers ofnewborn infants who were participants in the research study she led. Anumber of the papers in this book function as pairs, and Simon Clarke’s‘Psycho-social Research: Relating Self, Identity and Otherness’ includes a

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�e International Journal of

vivid and moving account of psychoanalytic psychosocial research with acomplex, conflicted subject (Billy) who evokes correspondingly divided emo-tional reactions in the researcher. Rooting himself in the self-reflective workof Habermas and the Frankfurt school, Clarke reveals his own powerfuland conflicting identifications with Billy, evoking what Karen Izod laterdescribes as the ‘babble’ of her inner and outer worlds as she tries to makesense of her professional task. In one sense, all this may seem familiar andrecognizable from a conventional clinical perspective – a translation intoother domains of inquiry of the need to attend to our countertransference ifwe are to grasp the deep subjectivity of another person, group or socialprocess. But actually we are not very accustomed to hearing psychoanalyticclinicians discuss the ‘babble’ of own their inner worlds, and the reasons forthis are important.

Object relations psychoanalysis assumes that from the beginning humandevelopment occurs through the medium of relationships, with drives andinstincts subordinated to the individual’s innate disposition to seek connec-tion with other people. Intersubjectivity is the foundation of mind, develop-ment and, later, the clinical situation. The infant–mother dyad and thetriangular structure of oedipal relations are the dynamic and affectivecrucibles for who we do, or do not, become in later life. However, siblingrelationships are now emerging as a more prominent feature of psychoana-lytic theorizing and are significant for the gradual process of decentring orrepositioning the traditional emphasis on hierarchical relationshipsorganized by dependency, within a broader field of relational realities andpossibilities. Because we are born into circumstances of both dependenceand interdependence, the dynamic tension between hierarchical and ‘lateral’registers of relationship is the site of a continuing struggle at the heart ofpsychoanalytic, social and political practice and theory. How this plays outwithin particular contexts is revealed through specific institutional, theoreti-cal and relational cultures, and the tendency of mainstream psychoanalyticculture to promote a rather authoritarian and status-conscious view of itself,of patient–analyst relationships, and of its relations with wider society is onepreoccupation of this collection.

Susie Orbach’s chapter on ‘Democratizing Psychoanalysis’ is the mosttrenchant in this respect. She says: ‘‘Relational psychoanalysis has a demo-cratic, co-created view of the therapeutic relationship. Instead of a view ofthe patient as other, as the object of the therapeutic gaze, relational psycho-analysis always sees the person in therapy as an influencing and aninfluence-able subject’’ (p. 27). But, as we know, democracy is a very elasticcontainer. On the one hand, Orbach accurately pinpoints persistentauthoritarian trends within contemporary psychoanalytic culture, illustratingthese with a series of vivid and recognizable vignettes. On the other hand,neither she nor any of the other contributors wish to promote a ‘leveller’ orpopulist notion of psychoanalytic democracy, and Orbach offers a succinctand nuanced refutation of one common criticism of relational psycho-analysis, namely that it must entail inappropriate self-disclosure.

Writing from a Lacanian perspective Paul Zeal in ‘Staying Close to theSubject’ maintains that: ‘‘The analyst is in the position of the one who is

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supposed to know … It does not follow that he does, or that he knows bet-ter – but he knows differently or at least something, and his job is to holdthat place despite transference assaults’’ (p. 46). Thus the relational psycho-analytic field or ‘space’ is still structured, or ordered, and the process of its‘co-creation’ is not symmetrical. These writers would, I think, distancethemselves from some of the more extreme propositions of hermeneuticallyoriented psychoanalysts which seem to dissolve the boundary between thera-pist and patient, trapping them within the well-known ‘hermeneutic circle’of solipsistic co-production of psychic reality.

Paul Hoggett takes up this idea of asymmetrical contributions to the pro-duction of intersubjective relations in his chapter on ‘Relational Thinkingand Welfare Practice’, critiquing both the excess rationalism of liberal viewsof the ‘welfare subject’ and the tendency of post-liberal models of welfare to‘‘a phobic avoidance of critique of the welfare subject’’ (p. 69) resulting in ashallow notion of human experience and identity. He proposes instead a dia-logic welfare practice that ‘‘validates the authority a professional derivesfrom their craft’’ as well as the ‘‘knowing of the client ⁄ user ⁄ patient … in areflexive and transparent way’’ (p. 76). His contribution is exceptionallylucid and theoretically incisive, and he has probably done more than anyonein the UK to deepen the potential of social theory and psychoanalysis toinform each other creatively and authentically. The chapter lacks a practiceillustration, but Lyn Froggett’s contribution compensates excellently with anextended account of the ‘welfare’ encounter between Tom, ‘‘a slight, paleseventeen-year-old who looks younger than his years and less dangerousthan his reputation’’ (p. 95) and the poet Bob as he facilitates Tom’s creativeemergence within a space of ‘energetic thirdness’.

For both authors ‘community’ and ‘society’ are constituted through socialrelationships that simultaneously create and partake of this third area whichtranscends the individuals who inhabit it while depending upon them for itsvitality and orderly character. There are no abstract universals governingthese domains, any more than there are in the clinical setting, and this rec-ognition returns us to a profound sense of our responsibility for ourselves asindividuals who make our societies, including their difficulties, as they inturn make us.

Is there a proper method for the psychoanalytic study of larger social sys-tems? Without one, the danger is, as I once heard it expressed, that weapproach society as though it were an enormous patient – a form of wildanalysis. Group Relations work – the study of large human systems andtheir sub-units by system members under controlled conditions – is the bestanswer we have, and it informs the two final chapters on organizational andteaching consultancy by Karen Izod and Margaret Page. Both authorsextend the theoretical repertoire of the book, and illustrate the absoluteneed for psychoanalytic work to join forces with systems theories andpractices (another ‘other’ for psychoanalysis to contend with!) as it widensits horizons of engagement. Two brief observations from these chaptersstruck me. Izod refers to her early training as a social worker with its some-what utopian political aspirations, and her later clinical training at theTavistock Clinic. ‘‘Seemingly two ends of a spectrum, these two approaches

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were equally concerned with the liberating of the individual from eitherrestrictive internal or external authorities’’ (p. 164). This is a neat encapsula-tion of the convergence to which all these authors are committed. But inwhat spirit? Page cites another writer’s experience of being a ‘‘temperedradical’’ as a way of capturing the tensions of ‘‘living with apparently irrec-oncilable discourses and values without allying oneself exclusively witheither one’’ (p. 187). One is tempted to play further with this idea: good-tempered radicalism, bad-tempered, or both as circumstances dictate? Thisbook is about the struggle to conduct politics from within the depressiveposition, and not pathologize oneself or others for inevitable lapses into theparanoid–schiziod.

Relational psychoanalysis is on a journey, starting in the UK (Winnicott,Fairbairn and Bion are among the most cited sources), moving to the USA(Stephen Mitchell, Thomas Ogden and Jessica Benjamin are key inspirationshere) and back to the UK. However, the contemporary view from the USA(or elsewhere in the world) might look different to the one evoked in thisbook, and Lynne Layton’s opening chapter, ‘Relational Thinking: FromCulture to Couch and Couch to Culture’, provides an important correctiveto any parochialism as well as tracing the lineage of the key ideas in theAmerican context. Like others in this volume she places central importanceon the question of how we understand enactments in psychoanalytic work.If we see these only as evidence for the patient’s disturbance, or only assuccessful efforts to breach the clinician’s professional defences through pro-jective identification, then we are immediately at risk of instigating a binarydivision, of assigning patients to membership of a different ‘moral commu-nity’. But is this really how ‘mainstream’ psychoanalysts think and work? Towhat extent might the critical project of this book be directed at a strawfigure, constructed as much out of projections onto the psychoanalytic‘establishment’ just as, it is proposed, this establishment can inferiorize thepatient through projection of its own anxieties?

These are large questions and I will end with just a few observations. Ibelieve this book opens up critically important questions about the nature ofpower relations, both within the psychoanalytic community and in our socie-ties. In our lifetimes we have witnessed entrenched politically oppressive statesystems dissolve almost overnight, while others cling intransigently to power.We can work for many years with patients and be rewarded with quite sud-den transformations, or not. The trauma, loss and anxiety that lie at theheart of defensive personal and social relations do not always dissolve in theface of our best efforts. In the clinical background our own lives are also inconstant evolution, or may be punctuated by ‘catastrophic change’. Doingour own psychoanalytic self-reflective work on these processes is just part ofthe job description. There are good, but also suspect, reasons why cliniciansdo not often publish extended personal accounts of their own crises or analy-sis, although a few have. But to take up just one idea from this book, thetendency for clinicians not to speak (even to one another) about their inter-nal ‘babble’ when this is a central part of the experience of doing clinicalwork seems to me to be an aspect of professional defensiveness, an attemptto withhold something in the service of hanging on to power.

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Lynne Layton acknowledges the resonance between her own thinkingabout intersubjectivity and the post-Kleinian discipline of tracking the min-ute transference–countertransference oscillations of the clinical encounter.Here is a small window onto the inner world of the clinician. Occasionally,someone takes a bold and brilliant step and Thomas Ogden’s work on theimportance of ‘reverie’ in clinical work has extended the boundaries of sig-nificance with respect to the practitioner’s inner experience in a disciplinedand revelatory manner. But we should attend to Susie Orbach’s evocationsof the negative tendencies in psychoanalytic culture because they tell usthere is much further to go. The project of helping psychoanalysis tobecome a more ‘open’ social and institutional system may be crucial to itssurvival in the modern world. This book shows how psychoanalysis can playa role in understanding and transforming intransigent, destructive and dam-aging features of that same world. Dialogue and openness to the differentexperience of the ‘other’ are the key, requiring us in turn to be more authen-tically open to ourselves – something psychoanalysis and clinicians of allpersuasions need to struggle with perpetually, and something that, in truth,we ought to be just that bit better equipped to tackle than we sometimesseem to be.

Andrew Coopere-mail: acooper@tavi-port.org

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