Sublime

We can no longer operate on the assumption that the Western capitalist culture of self-contained individualism is superior to all other cultural forms and continue to encode those values in the practice of psychoanalysis.

A traditional ego-psychology analysis typically focuses on analyzing the patient’s inner life as the main source of problems. In contrast, a relational analyst emphasizes not only the patient’s inner life, but also the mutual relational dynamics of the therapeutic interaction in the session.

Relational psychoanalytic models, sometimes referred to as intersubjective, do not view individuals as discrete centers of experience and action; instead, they assert that all self-experience is ontologically social. They challenge the “myth of the isolated mind” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 7) and suggest that psychological experience is derived... See more

On Darwin's influence of Psychoanalysis

The psychoanalysis of self psychology serves an implicit social function in seamlessly hiding the contradictions in the economic, political and cultural arrangements of our society by not analyzing them, and therefore allowing them to remain as unconscious determinants of suffering.

Due to the limitation of concepts, deeper understanding comes from holding multiple perspectives simultaneously, recognizing their utility and their limitations, and also being willing to let all of them go. It’s about developing a fluid way of seeing that can shift between unity and multiplicity, between being and non-being, dwelling on neither.