PCC candidate, Philip Lance, continues his series for the New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast with this new interview from November 14, 2018.
The new book is The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning (Routledge, 2018) by Robert Grossmark. As Lance writes, Grossmark draws from the Object Relations tradition, especially Balint, Bion, and Winnicott, and integrates it with theories from the Relational world of contemporary psychoanalysis. He values the regressive processes which psychoanalysis can induce in patients, returning them to “areas of the self that are unlikely to be reached by dialogic engagement.” And he also values contemporary ideas about how these areas of the self can sometimes only be known through the “flow of enactive engagement” rather than through verbally driven representational modes of communication. Multiple extended clinical vignettes help the reader “live through” the points that Grossmark is making by showing how they work in practice. This illustrates his idea that the most powerful way to reach patients can be by “companioning” them as they show us, rather than tell us, about their internal worlds.