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. Self-critique was the focus of De-Idealizing Relational Theory. Decentering Relational Theory pushes critique in a different direction by explicitly engaging the questions of theoretical and clinical overlap – and lack thereof – with writers from other psychoanalytic orientations. In part, this comparison involves critique, but in part, it does not. It addresses issues of influence, both bidirectional and unidimensional. Our authors took up this challenge in different ways.

Like our authors in De-Idealizing, writers who contributed to Decentering were asked to move beyond their own perspective without stereotyping alternate perspectives. Instead, they seek to expand our understanding of the convergences and divergences between different relational perspectives and those of other theories.

Whether to locate relational thought in a broader theoretical envelope, make links to other theories, address critiques leveled at us, or push relational thinking forward, our contributors thought outside the box. The kinds of comparisons they were asked to make were challenging. We are grateful to them for having taken up this challenge. Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists across the theoretical spectrum.

Lewis Aron, Ph.D., ABPP 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, Ph.D., 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 has co-edited two books on the trans-generational transmission of trauma. She practices in NYC and in Teaneck, NJ.

Joyce Slochower, Ph.D., ABPP 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. Second editions of both books were released in 2014. She is in private practice in New York City, where she sees individuals and couples, and runs supervision and study groups.