Working with the relational unconscious: an integration of intrapsychic and relational analysis

From its inception, psychoanalysis has tended to idealize the curative value of insight while devaluing the mutative significance of the analytic relationship. This paper argues that applying the construct of the "relational unconscious" in clinical practice offers a possible resolution of this "mind-relationship" rift. From this perspective, transference and countertransference provoke a continual intersubjective/interpersonal enactment of a co-created infantile drama emanating from the internal worlds of analyst and analysand in which a vital form of parental and/or self loving is at stake. Case vignettes demonstrate how to apply the relational unconscious in clinical practice.