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Relational Horizons: Mediterranean voices bring passion and reason to relational psychoanalysis edited by Alejandro Ávila
From the Foreword By Spyros D. Orfanso
A funny thing happened to me when I was preparing the scientific
program for the 2007 Athens conference for the International Association
for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). A computer
malfunction caused the loss of information about the panel submissions
of the Spaniards who were planning to travel to Greece and participate
in the event. I was upset because I had no way to communicate with them.
Not knowing even their names, I felt devastation and walked around for
days murmuring, “What happened to the Spaniards?” Finally, the
Spaniards sent an email message and we resolved matters. They came to
the conference armed with dazzling theoretical and clinical
presentations for an eager international audience. The Andalusian-Athens
connection was saved. Years later in 2011, Alejandro Avila of Madrid
and Ramon Riera of Barcelona co-chaired the Madrid conference of IARPP,
the very year I was president of IARPP. Thus, continued the scholarly
contributions of today’s Spaniards to the expansion and dissemination of
relational ideas and practice. If it can be said that relational
thinking has been part of the global age of psychoanalysis, and I
believe there is clear evidence for this, then the Spaniards have played
a crucial role.
Relationality as a concept has evolved over time to become an entity
of its own, on which theoretical, social, and educational enterprises
have been built. In the development of relational psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy, a book emerging from a specific country or geographical
region is a natural addition. The creation of this edited volume by
Avila is a major achievement. By composing it, Avila and his colleagues
allow us to consider the vast archipelago of relational thinking with
Spanish eyes.
It is of historical interest that the first translation of Freud’s
collected works was in Spanish by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset. But
as Avila explains while relational thinking took formal hold in Spain in
the early part of the 21st century, it has its roots in the 1960s when
the intrapsychic began to lose its grip on the clinical psychological
world of Spain. The contributors to this volume have been influenced by
the early developments of the relational school in the United States
and even before that by the pioneering interpersonal and cultural
schools of psychoanalysis as exemplified by H. S. Sullivan and Erich
Fromm. Yet, the contributors in this book travel with their own
Mediterranean sensibilities about theory construction, and ways of
uniting the humanities and sciences.
Culture and context have always been said to be important in modern
psychology but those who practice relational psychoanalysis actually
mean it. Moreover, one of the major clinical principles of relational
perspective is that every psychoanalytic dyad has its unique features
and from this we know that the participants have to invent their own
therapeutic process of change. This process has bidirectional elements.
It is rooted in each participant’s psychological core and the manner in
which he or she is influenced by the other. But because they were not
directly educated in psychoanalysis by Anglo-American traditions, what
we find in these pages is a particular passion for relational thinking
that incorporates a Mediterranean sensibility with a particular Spanish
coloring.
This does not mean that they use the post-Romantic European imaginary
that is treated critically by many contemporary thinkers within Spain
and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The reader of this book will not
find the most frequent romanticizing tendency that the Spanish culture
is the expression of a tragic, primitive, and folkloric Spain. There are
no references to Don Quixote, the poet Federico García Lorca,
the painter Salvador Dalí, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, the composer
Manuel de Falla, medieval Iberia, the Franco dictatorship, Guernica, economic austerity, the political leftist party Podemos, or soccer.
The thinking and values that are at the root of these assembled
essays go beyond stereotypes. They bring us to a wide breadth of
coverage of contemporary relational thinking and what strategies and
methods are viable and effective in best serving others. The Spanish
sensibility in these pages is a modern one.
Like other nations of the Mediterranean (i.e., Greece, Italy, and
Israel), Spain’s cultural heritage has often been turned into a
commodity for craving tourists seeking exoticism. In the volume, you the
reader hold in your hands, this is highly resisted. These studies have
an insightful sensitivity to globalization and its means of
communication across nations and generations. In fact, it may be an
underlying premise of all the chapters in this book that understanding
our relationality in a global age and its pathologies allows us to brave
our vulnerable, common humanity-that of our patients and our own. The
pathologies, according to Florentine philosopher Elena Pulcini, can be
our sense of unlimited individualism and fearful, closed communities.
Deep down what the writers know in their blood and bones is that the
relational approach is neither comforting for the patient nor the
therapist, but it can be healing. What is clear is that the Spaniards
are not relationalists because they lack discipline. They are
relationalists because they think deeply and feel deeply and therefore
honor their humanity, their social consciousness and that of their
patients. Lastly, they help us understand, to paraphrase the American
artist Robert Rauschenberg, that relational ideas are not real estate.
We have reasons to be grateful to Alejandro Avila and the
contributors to this anthology and the English language version of their
essays. They remind us that some recent and sparkling thinking about
relational horizons can be accomplished from across the Atlantic. We
should not be surprised. We might even be influenced if we have the good
fortune.
I have always been fond of a delicious story told by the playful
Chilean Pablo Neruda. It was about being with the enchanting enchanter –
Federico García Lorca. Neruda was reading one of the poems he was
working on to his friend. Neruda says that halfway through his
Andalusian friend would stop, raise his arms, shake his head, cover his
ears, and cry, “Stop! Stop! That’s enough, don’t read any more, you’ll
influence me!” I believe the reader of this book may be delighted with
such an influence.
–Spyros D Orfanos, Ph.D., ABPP
New York City, USA
https://ipbooks.net/
Language: Prof. Slochower
will speak in English. A bilingual version of the papers she will be using
will be provided during the seminar. The oral interventions and debates will be
translated simultaneously (English-Spanish and vice-versa). The participants
will be able to participate in English or Spanish. Translation: María Hernández
Gázquez.
