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Marie T. Hoffman’s book is an interesting and challenging contribution to theology, philosophy, and to the theory and practice of what is called “relational psychoanalysis,” an innovative recent direction of modern psychoanalysis. It developed and gained great popularity among therapists and theorists in the 1980s, after the publication of Jay R. Greenberg’s and Stephen A. Mitchell’s book Object relations in psychoanalytic theory(1983), particularly in the United States and the English speaking world, in sharp contrast to the French and Hispanic language area where Jacques Lacan’s structuralism is still prevalent. Relational psychoanalysis emphasizes one’s relatedness to others, mutual recognition, the importance of early attachment, interpersonally mediated subjective experience, that is, intersubjectivity. Relational theory, though relatively new as a genuine school, has many sources in twentieth century psychoanalysis, such as the British school of “object relations,” the American...

DOI: 10.1007/s11212-012-9165-3

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