Historically, the third force was founded to move beyond what Maslow and others saw as reductionism in psychoanalysis as well as behaviorism. Existential-humanistic and psychoanalytic psychotherapies have often been regarded as being worlds apart. In this article, I suggest that dialogical-existential therapy and interpersonal psychoanalysis have significant common ground, particularly in their emphasis on relatedness as being the key factor that facilitates change. I show how interpersonal psychoanalysis, as articulated by Mitchell and Aron, goes further than intersubjectivity theory in bringing psychoanalysis and existential-humanistic psychology closer together. I also show how this perspective is relevant to clinical work.
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