Advances in Relational Psychotherapy

Interview / Q&A with Dr Neil Altman

This presentation offers a synthesis of perspectives drawn from British Kleinian theory and American relational psychoanalyzis focusing on our understanding of the function of guilt within the psyche, why people so readily hurt each other, and the role of reparation as both a defense against the burden of guilt and as a demonstration of love to the injured person. Neil Altman suggests that relationalists tend to follow the Kleinian idea that guilt arises from “hurting the one you love”, but see both the hurt and the love as socially constructed, in a dialectical relationship to each other. Altman elaborates these themes through a case study. Here we see two people, each struggling with the guilt that arises in ruptures, impasses and enactments, and struggling toward the kind of repair that makes one feel that goodness and badness can co-exist. The case pivots on his realization that an enactment has grown out of his own childhood trauma.