Complexity and Risk in Relational Therapy: Discussion of Joye Weisel-Barth’s “Courting the ‘Real’ and Stumbling in ‘Reality’”

In this courageous and conceptually rich article, Joye Weisel-Barth shares her experience with her patient, Lara, in which a spontaneous, well-intended decision at a moment of heightened emotional connection led, unpredictably, to later events which caused the treatment to collapse. Weisel-Barth’s article invites reflection regarding both the complexity and risks involved in the analytic therapist’s greater participatory freedom—a core element in contemporary relational thinking, broadly defined. I consider what happened between Weisel-Barth and Lara from four points-of-view. The first has to do with the mutuality-asymmetry dialectic first named by Lew Aron (1991), developed more fully by Wally Burke (1992), and later canoninzed by Irwin Hoffman (1998). The second concerns what Madeleine and Willy Baranger (1961–1962) first recognized as the necessary ambiguity of the analytic situation. Related to that is the necessary complexity of the analyst’s subjectivity-as-analyst. And the fourth set of considerations, informed by Rachel Peltz’s (2012) article, “Ways of Hearing: Getting Inside Psychoanalysis,” concerns what it means to “go in close” in an analytic relationship, with particular reference to contemporary relational and Bionian approaches.