RELATIONSHIP IN AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

The centrality of language for a Freudian theory of mind and treatment has not been retained by most post-Freudian theorists. American writers have turned to academic developmental research on mother-child interac-tions to depict the preoedipal period as preverbal, presymbolic, non-conscious. This view presents the early relationship as developing in linear stages in which visual observational data (e.g., contingent behavior action patterns between two persons) are privileged over aural-oral data of communicational exchanges. An alternative view is presented that rede-fines the earliest relationship in terms of communicational exchanges, mediation, and dialogue. The claim is that understanding the nature of mediated communication keeps language central to psychoanalysis and reestablishes an intrapsychic dimension in the concept of relationship that is lost when relationship is reduced to behavioral patterns. We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. ElioT, from “liTTlE GiddinG” A merican psychoanalysis in the first decade of the twenty-first century is not the same as when it first arrived on these shores, whether one dates its arrival by Freud’s 1909 Clark University lectures or from the estab-lishment of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911. American psychoanalysis of that early period remained tied to its European roots, continuing to look for its legitimacy to Freud, living in exile in England, an