Decentering Relational Theory ― A Comparative Critique

Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique invites relational theorists to contemplate the influence, overlaps, and relationship between relational theory and other perspectives. The companion to this book, De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within, considers the strengths and limitations of relational thinking from the inside out. Decentering Relational Theory pushes that critique in the opposite direction by contemplating and elaborating on how relational theory overlaps with—and differs from—other perspectives.

The contributors to this book were asked to address the following questions:

• What can relational analysts learn from other schools?
• Can they be curious and thoughtful about their critiques of relational theory and practice?
• Can the relational field grow from engaging alternate perspectives?
• What clinical techniques and/or theoretical ideas could be usefully included within the relational canon?
• Have other schools of psychoanalysis offered legitimate critiques of the relational perspective, and if so, how can these be engaged with?

Like De-Idealizing Relational Theory, the idea is to engage in a loving critique that creates no straw horses. Rather than stereotyping or their own or alternate perspectives, the contributors seek to expand understanding of the convergences and divergences between different relational perspectives and those of other theories. Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique will appeal to relational psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Lewis Aron, Ph.D., is the director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the author and editor of numerous articles and books on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and well known for his study and reading groups around the world. His most recent book, co-authored with Galit Atlas, is the Routledge title Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice.

Sue Grand is faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective and The Hero in the Mirror, and co-edited two books on the trans-generational transmission of trauma. She practices in NYC and in Teaneck, NJ.

Joyce Slochower is Professor Emerita at Hunter College and Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is on the Faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program, the Steven Mitchell Center, the National Training Program of NIP, the Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies, and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco. She is the author of the Routledge titles Holding and Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Collisions. She is in private practice in New York City.