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Articles

We Are All Relational, but Are Some More Relational Than Others?

Completing the Paradigm Shift Toward Relationality

Pages 122-137
Published online: 28 Dec 2017
 
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This article discusses Ray Little’s (2013) integration of humanistic transactional analysis with both traditional and relational psychoanalysis from the vantage point of a wider, broad-spectrum integrative perspective, with particular emphasis on TA’s sister tradition of body psychotherapy. The growing consensus across diverse therapeutic approaches regarding the developmental origins of relational patterns is acknowledged. The problems, inconsistencies, and contradictions within the integrative project are discussed, with particular reference to the origins of humanistic psychology during the 1960s and their partially reactive differentiation against psychoanalysis, which leaves today’s practitioners with unresolved legacies in the form of fixed assumptions regarding both theory and practice as well as key concepts such as ego and working alliance. Taking the key notion of the therapist’s equidistant position between the needed and repeated relationship as its starting point, the author suggests that enactment is the central notion of relationality. A multiplicity of diverse therapeutic kinds of relatedness is affirmed as valid, and different notions of the relational and inconsistencies and ambivalences in integrative formulations are addressed. The aim is to reach a more solid, robust integration that is grounded in a bodymind understanding of enactment as the paradoxical essence of therapeutic action.

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Author information

Michael Soth

Author Biography
Michael Soth is an integral-relational body psychotherapist, trainer, and supervisor (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy) living in Oxford, United Kingdom. Since 1986, he has been teaching on a variety of counseling and therapy training courses alongside working as training director at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy. Inheriting concepts, values, and ways of working from both psychoanalytic and humanistic traditions, he is interested in the therapeutic relationship as a bodymind process between two people who are both wounded and whole. In his work and teaching, he integrates an unusually wide range of psychotherapeutic approaches, working toward a full-spectrum integration of all therapeutic modalities and approaches, each with their gifts, wisdom, and expertise as well as their shadow aspects, fallacies, and areas of obliviousness. Extracts from his published writing as well as hand-outs, blogs, and summaries of presentations are available through his website for INTEGRA CPD: www.counsellingpsychotherapycpd.co.uk as well as at www.soth.co.uk. He can be reached at 14 Hawthorn Close, Oxford OX2 9DY, United Kingdom; email: michael@soth.co.uk. He can also be found on facebook.com/INTEGRA.CPD or follow him on Twitter @INTEGRA_CPD.