Between Imagination and Rigour: A Response to Farhad Dalal’s Article ‘The Analytic and the Relational: Inquiring into Practice’

Abstract

The relational perspective of analysis is a way of looking at, practising, and understanding the whole of analysis—including psycho-analysis, group-analysis, and socio-analysis—rather than a specific school of psychoanalysis. Farhad Dalal’s excellent article describes the evolution of his thinking and practice, from a classical analytic stance to a relational conception of it. There are two ways of conceiving and practising psychoanalysis, which he calls ‘the analytic’ and ‘the relational’, derived from two contrasting conceptions of the world and of life. This generates a split between theory and practice in analysis. Some practitioners adhere to the classical view, but are actually relational in their practice; others have adopted relational theory, but maintain the detached scientific attitude of the classical Freudian analyst. Freud’s abandonment of the traumatic theory of neuroses had unconscious sources that determined the injunction for analysts not to be relational. Group analysis, on the other hand, has been relational from the beginning. S.H. Foulkes had a contradiction between his adherence to Freudian theory and the revolutionary aspects of his thinking and practice—what Dalal calls ‘radical Foulkes’. The hierarchical, detached, and emotionally closed off form of relating prescribed by classical analysis is anti-therapeutic. By contrast, the kind of therapeutic relation that Dalal strives to develop has connotations with engagement, reciprocity and mutuality, and may generate corrective emotional experiences. But human events are never fully explained or predictable, so that the corrective emotional experience is an occurrence, not a technique. The analyst works in a radical uncertainty and can only be guided by his intuition, which has then to be checked by rational critical analysis. This generates a dialectic tension between imagination and rigour, which must be kept and nursed, not solved. This corresponds to an analogical hermeneutic stance, which rejects both the dogmatic univocality of Modernism and the relativistic equivocality of Postmodernism. The analyst must respond with his whole being, and this being must be developed through a process of personality development, not training but formation (Bildung in German). This implies a particular epistemology, ontology, axiology, and ethics, a whole Weltanschauung and Lebensanschauung that includes the Golden Braid of thinking, feeling, and acting, on a basis of relating.