Analysts parents and child patients? A retrospective survey
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The article presents a retrospective review of the use of the metaphor of child development in relational thinking. The first relational critiques of the evolutionary derailment model and the feminist authors' relentlessness against the concept of holding in clinical work pushed relationalists towards a representation of the patient as necessarily adult and of analytical dialogue as intersubjective by definition. In my Winnicottian/relational perspective I expanded the concept of holding and proposed mediations that would make possible the coexistence of holding and relational thinking, exploring how the analyst's participation makes the holding experience possible. In reviewing and updating the terms of the controversy, the author offers new ideas on the clinical function of the holding company in buffering the sense of shame.
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