Where's the Gap and What's the Difference?

The relational turn in psychoanalysis brought into the foreground the interactive engagement between analyst and patient as a cocreated bidirectional process. It has developed a theory of dissociation and focused our attention on the ways in which multiple self-parts or self-states within each person interact. The author's perspective also emphasizes the importance of rupture and repair in the building of a new attachment relationship, as first theorized in the mother-infant relation. Depicting enactments as part of a necessary process of encountering otherwise inaccessible self-states and the relations they presume, this perspective allows for more “messiness” and what Stern has called an attitude of “courting surprise.” It includes the proposition that such enactment can produce change through new experiences of lawfulness and recognition of feelings and intentions in an attachment relationship.