new

Not all news is good news, as not always no news means good news. At least, not in science, not in arts and not in psychoanalysis. However, what is new, when it does not frighten too much, has the potential to arise the interest. This is, perhaps, because it activates our exploring, risktaking behaviors, which, as we all know, represent something radically opposed to conservative, security seeking attitudes.
Today, looking at some of psychoanalytical writings, from here and from everywhere, in which the authors' efforts seem to be more directed towards defending and preserving and much less toward innovating, I can't help thinking about the immobilizing power of Bowbly's 'attachment behavior'. This seems to be odd since, as practicing psychoanalysts, we all wish our patients to change, to dare to get new attitudes and to get rid of the old ones.
The aim of this paper is to succinctly call attention to some relatively new, not 'classical' ideas, which, from my point of view, have recently presented those notes of novelty susceptible to arise some interest or a certain fear and resistance. In a relatively chronological order and with some theoretical and clinical continuity, these could be:

Attachment theory
Relational-intersubjective model
Implicit relational knowing

Attachment theory

In 1960, John Bowbly, the author of the attachment theory, wrote: It is my belief that the theory of instinctual responses deriving from ethology and advanced in my previous paper permits a new approach. The heart of this theory is that the organism is provided with a repertoire of behaviour patterns, which are bred into it like the features of its anatomy and physiology,² and which have become characteristic of its species because of their survival value to the species. Such, it was suggested, are many of the responses characteristic of the family life of Man, namely those mediating relationships between the sexes and between parents and young. (Bowlby, J., 1960, p. 94)
Twenty-one years later (Bowlby, J., 1981), he became more specific:
Often, in fact, when we feel impelled to act in a certain way that is readily explicable in terms of biological function, we concoct 'reasons' for doing so that bear little or no relation to the causes of our behaviour. For example, a child or adult, who in order to reduce risk is biologically disposed to respond to strange sounds in the dark by seeking his attachment figure, gives as his reason that he is afraid of ghosts. This is analogous to the 'reasons' for his behaviour concocted by someone who is, without knowing it, acting on a post-hypnotic suggestion. (p.247)
The outcomes of this kind of hypnotic experiments have always indicated a specific feature of our mind: an (presumable) inborn predisposition to explain/justify our feelings, thoughts and behaviors. And very often, these explanations, 'concocted' at the verbal-symbolic level, have little or nothing to do with real dynamics of our motivations.³
In the quoted material, Bowbly wrote further:
The development during ontogeny of a set of systems of the kind described in humans, as well as in individuals of many other species, is attributed to the action of natural selection… It will be noticed that once attachment behaviour, and other forms of biologically determined behaviour, are conceived in terms of control theory, the problem of the purposiveness of behaviour is solved without abandoning the concept of causation. Furthermore, the distinction between causation and function, sadly neglected in traditional psychoanalytic theory, becomes explicit. Activation and termination are caused when a system constructed in a particular way receives information of particular sorts. Of the various consequences to which activation leads, the one postulated as its biological function is the one that, evidence suggests, has led to the system having evolved during phylogeny... In the case of attachment behaviour, the function postulated is that of diminishing the risk of the individual coming to harm.

At this level of analysis the question of whether an individual is aware of what he is doing, let alone why he is doing it, has no relevance, in fact no more relevance than has the question of whether an individual is aware that he is breathing and, if so, realizes why he should be doing so. Biological systems serving vital functions, whether at a behavioral or a physiological level, must be capable of operating automatically...
At this point, we need to emphasize the sharp distinction between conditions necessary to terminate a certain form of behaviour, commonly referred to as its goal, and the biological function the behaviour serves. In the case of attachment behaviour in childhood, whereas we commonly expect both mother and child to be aware of the conditions necessary to terminate it, for example a certain degree of proximity, we do not expect awareness of function. The same holds in the case of eating and sexual behaviour. Most of us are aware that eating food will assuage our hunger and we find pleasure in eating; but only the sophisticated are concerned with its nutritional function. Similarly, sexual desire can be assuaged without awareness of reproductive function. In both cases all but the sophisticated are concerned only with an urge to behave in a certain way and with the pleasure anticipated and received on reaching the terminating conditions (or goal), not with the biological function that the behaviour may serve...
The distinction I have drawn between the function served by a certain form of behaviour and our knowledge of, and striving to reach, the conditions that will terminate that behaviour is one of the criteria that distinguishes the biological realm from the psychological. Another is the distinction between, on the one hand, the behavioral system, postulated as a biological given together with some (though not all) of the conditions that activate and terminate it and, on the other, our awareness of the urge to reach a certain goal and our effort to find means to do so...

So far, in sketching the conceptual framework I favour, I have doubtless said enough for you to see a number of points at which it differs from the traditional one. For example, the theory of motivation advanced differs radically from Freud's theory of psychic energy and drive, and the theory of developmental pathways differs in similar degree from his theories of libidinal phases, fixation and regression. Furthermore, the concept of attachment behaviour sees it as distinct from, and of a status equal to, that of eating and sexual behaviour, and as a characteristic present throughout life.(pag. 246-248)

It is not difficult to notice that in Bowbly's texts there is a kind of implicit questioning about classical psychoanalytic reliance on insight and reflexive verbal symbolization as main instruments for therapeutical change. From Bowbly's perspective, our behaviours are not seen as articulated at the conscious, preconscious or unconscious symbolic mind. There, where it was supposed to unfold the unique, specific human decision making processes, take place only some activities of detecting and interpreting clues for triggering or stopping the automatically driven behaviors. Therefore, what can be read between Bowbly's lines is that our conceptual mind cannot do more than observe the present circumstances of the individual's rapport with his environment, anticipate based on past experience the possible evolutions and trigger or stop certain algorithms for actions (the 'internal working models') with more or less efficient relational-adaptive finality. These behaviours, in themselves, the forms of their unfolding and their functions are very little to nothing influenced by the mind's present verbal symbolic thinking and decisionmaking activities. Consequently, our conscious judgments and feelings are often rather simple, post factum effects or 'justifications' for our actions, a kind of epiphenomena derived from those automatically driven behaviors, 'which are bred into', filogenetically and ontogenetically, outside of the symbolic thinking.⁴
Bowbly's ideas have been resented as very uncomfortable by a big part of the psychoanalytical world. There, in the Enlightenment tradition, the fact that human mind seemed to be controlled by non-conscious fantasies or phantasms was balanced by the idea that those contents had the same nature (symbolic or at least pre-symbolic) as our conscious thinking. Therefore, they could be greatly influenced by insight. In addition, even accepting that some of these mental contents exist in a 'primary', nonsymbolic form, they could and should be 'contained' and transformed into self-reflecting thinking, ready to be used in the service of man's free will. In spite of his efforts to remain as much as possible within the tradition, by emphasizing the analyst's clinical interpretive activities, Bowbly's writings were long purposely ignored, and he was almost 'exiled' from the psychoanalytical community. His theory has been seen by many as too 'external-objectivistic', too different from classical view, as outside the realm of proper psychoanalysis. Only recently, in the last two or three decades, by object relations theorists' efforts and in the context of new relational-intersubjective developments, the attachment theory was seriously taken into consideration. However, even today, there are some voices, which, besides trying to understand and integrate Bowbly's ideas into the main psychoanalytic theoretical thinking, express some prudent reserves. As an example, in 2006, Zepf S. wrote:
Bowlby's comprehensive allusions to the behaviour of subhuman precursors of human behaviour might perhaps be deserving to some extent. But the general presumption that these behaviours are biologically designed to preserve the species is, epistemologically speaking, just as unmaintainable as the equation of mechanical operations, animal and human behaviour while ignoring their differentia specifica.
… Although there is an epistemological and objective incompatibility of basic psychoanalytic tenets and attachment theory, attachment concepts in varying formulations have been adopted in psychoanalytic reasoning...
How could psychoanalysis deepen its knowledge if it became mixed up with concepts of a theory whose empirical subject Freud had already conceptualized, a theory, in which not only the dynamic unconscious but also the drive-concept - both belonging to the 'Corner-stones of psychoanalytic theory'... - are discarded ? It is the significance of attachment which should be integrated into the theoretical body of psychoanalysis. (2006. Zepf, S., p. 1543)
Together with those who embraced, developed and used attachment theory (like Fonagy, Hesse and Main, Levy and Blatt, Slade, etc.), trying to adapt it to psychoanalytical thinking by emphasizing the function of 'internal working models', many other authors from object relation schools considered Bowbly as one of the most important founders of their trend of thinking. One of them (Mitchell, 1999) wrote from a relational perspective:
'…Bowlby's virtual expulsion from mainstream psychoanalysis in the early 1960s makes some sense in terms of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, as he was several steps ahead of his own time.'(p. 85)
'Both Freud and Bowlby were extremely involved with Darwin's contribution, but their Darwins were very different... Like Heinz Hartmann, Bowlby was most interested in what Darwin taught about animal adaptation to environmental conditions and niches. In the second volume of his attachment trilogy, Bowlby... refers to Freud as pre-Darwinian, because he did not grasp the importance in Darwin's theory of the evolution of species of the principle of natural selection. Bowlby, like Darwin, was interested in what animals do to maximize their chances for survival.' (p. 91)

Relational-intersubjective model

Nowadays, it seems almost impossible to separate the multiple intersubjective models from the relational orientations. In their evolution, intersubjectivity and relationality in psychoanalysis have been so closely intertwined that saying 'relational intersubjectivity' or 'intersubjective relationality' could sound like some real pleonastic constructions.⁵ However, mostly from an academic perspective, I am going to indicate some specific ideational marks of each perspective, those bits of revolutionary 'news' that have shocked at their time the well-established psychoanalytical thinking:
-- According to Frie and Reis (2001), the philosophical background of intersubjectivity seems to go back to some important non-Cartesian, 'phenomenologists', European thinkers, among whom the most notorious were: Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Binswanger, Merleau-Ponty and Habermas.
-- The first grains of 'clinical' psychoanalytical claimed intersubjectivity, with a note of (re)sentimental attitude, are considered to belong to Ferenczy, and had been drastically sanctioned by Freud himself. The idea of mutuality between analyst and patient has been felt as a heresy for almost three quarters of a century. It has surfaced slowly again, occupying a visible place on the psychoalytical arena only in the last decades of the 20th century and has become a stronger presence after 1990.
-- The best-known pioneers and promoters of intersubjectivity, Atwood and Stolorow (1984,1993), epistemologically related this position to sub-atomic, quantum physics, according to which an observing subject can not study an object from a neutral, separated, independent position, without his act of observing to modify/alter the state of the object. Applied to psychoanalytic process, this perspective dramatically questioned the nondirective, neutral and anonymous position claimed by classical Freudian and Kleinian analysts. Once the intersubjective ideas started to emerge, some writers have begun to talk about 'analyst's transference' on his patient and 'patient's countertransference' towards his analyst. More than that, sometimes the most blamed psychoanalysts' mistakes and weakness, the enactments of 'countertransference' and disclosures, started to be considered not only unavoidable, but also as some of the most efficient instruments for change.
-- The psychoanalytical process was not seen anymore as unfolding between an analyst (The Subject), who knows what is going on in the mind of his object of study (the patient) and tells him in a gradual, responsible and competent way only what 'should' be told, in order to bring him insight and change. Instead of an omniscient, objective and neutral specialist, the psychoanalyst working from an intersubjective position sees him/herself as a co-participant in an interpersonal encounter, in a mutually constructed relationship, where the 'truth' is a co-construction, a commune achievement.
-- 'The third one' (Ogden, 1994), necessary for triangulation and for self reflective thinking, considered as the most important vehicle for change, is no longer located exclusively in the psychoanalyst's mind but in the gestalt of the intersubjective interaction.
-- The main goal of the psychoanalytical cure is less directed towards bringing the repressed or split unconscious into consciousness, but more oriented towards the patient's achievement of the capacity to recognize the other, and to be recognized, as an independent center of initiative and action, as 'an equivalent center of being.' (Benjamin, J., 2000).
Regarding relational analysis, Mitchel (1999), one of the most important theorists of this most recent analytic orientation, very suggestively wrote:

'Like Descartes, traditional theories of motivation, including the psychoanalytic and the behavioral, begin with the individual organism, its physical needs, its interpersonal needs, its social needs. What are the various reasons we are drawn to one another ? Picture on oak leaf on a branch, asking the question: 'Why am I hanging around with these other leaves ?' Motivational theory in psychology and psychoanalysis has taken for granted the individual nature of the psyche (in this case, the oak leaf) and then provided motivations for object relations (or the fact that oak leaves tend to be found in clusters). But we are increasingly appreciating the implication of the fact that humans, like oak leaves, are not found in isolation, are not possible in isolation. Human minds are fundamentally social phenomena that become focalized and secondarily elaborated by individuals.' (Pp. 87-88).
And:
'We are so in the thick of relationality that it is almost impossible to fully appreciate its contours and inner workings - a bit like the eye trying to see itself.
Psychoanalysis has been struggling with the problems involved in addressing and understanding human relationality since the middle decades of the 20th century. In my view, the most important relational theorists were Bowlby, Fairbairn, Loewald, Sullivan, and Winnicott. Because mainstream psychoanalysis was so solidly occupied, both ideologically and politically, by Freudian/Kleinian drive theory, each of these theorists was consigned to marginality during the years in which their major contributions were introduced and, in some cases, for their lifetimes'.(p.88)
Some of the main tenants of relational analysts are:

-- Endowed from birth, as a social living organism, with the need and ability to relate to the other in order to exist, the human person develops and shapes from the beginning of his/her life the intrinsic internal relational scenarios. The mental/somatic pathology and some existential discomfort, which draw people to seek psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, are considered to come from an altered, 'defective' development of these relational scenarios. Not being able to relate to others in an adaptive way, these individuals need to re-adjust, to re-construct their internal relational scenarios. The psychoanalytic process, which is centered on the therapeutic relationship, represents the best chance a patient has to become aware (not necessarily conscious⁶) of his/her internal relational deficiencies, to change some of them, and to learn how to live better with those which cannot be too much amended.
-- The process of healing/changing is not anymore based on insight, like in classical analysis, but on improving/adjusting the internal relational models/scenarios. The capacity for self-reflexive thinking is seen more like a consequence of the development achieved at the level of internal relational algorithms. The insight, still valued by most relational analysts, is no longer considered the cause of the change, but mostly the result of it and a complementary factor for development.
-- From the contemporary relational perspective, which has become inseparable from the intersubjective position, the analyst and the patient have equal, though not symmetrical, positions as participant subjects in the psychoanalytical interactional process. They work together spontaneously, and not all the time necessarily consciously, to build new relational algorithms which would ameliorate or replace the old initial dysfunctional working relational models. Being himself a co-participant to the analytic relational interaction, the analyst is not excluded from change and improvement, but the maximum benefit naturally goes to the patient as the central protagonist of the therapeutic process. There are not excluded occurrences of psychoanalytical impasses, moments when the analyst enacts some of her/his internal deficiencies and the patient becomes the one who helps the therapeutic couple to find a way out from mutually created difficulties (Aron, L., 2000.). In addition, in some moments, enactments and disclosures, wittingly or not and more or less conscious from the analyst part, could bring forward the psychoanalytical process.

Implicit relational knowing

What could be referred to as 'implicit relational knowing' represents, by its high degree of complexity, novelty and by its radicalism, one of the most interesting developments of the present psychoanalytic field. Established in 1995 by several American psychoanalysts, child researchers, and child psychiatrists, the 'Boston Change Process Study Group'⁷ declared their intention to bring a 'greater clarity about the issues at stake' which 'is needed for the field of relational psychoanalysis to develop a coherent set of theoretical concepts.' (BCPSG, 2008, p. 126).
Based on 1985 Daniel Stern's (Stern, D., 1985) research on preverbal children, the ongoing efforts of the members of the BCPSG to conceptualize and communicate their new, very sophisticated and 'revolutionary' psychoanalytic perspective could be chronologically followed in some articles published in the last ten years.
Their first published 'manifest', which did not provoke too much echo, at least judging from the references appeared in the principal psychoanalytical publications, is an article from IJPA, suggestively titled 'Non-Interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The 'Something More' Than Interpretation', (Stern et al, 1998). The best way to describe the plethora of new ideas the authors advanced in this writing is to quote their own words:
'Using an approach based on recent studies of mother-infant interaction and non-linear dynamic systems and their relation to theories of mind, the authors propose that something more resides in interactional intersubjective process that gives rise to what they will call 'implicit relational knowing'. This relational procedural domain is intrapsychically distinct from the symbolic domain. In the analytic relationship it comprises intersubjective moments occurring between patient and analyst that can create new organisations in, or reorganise not only the relationship between the interactants, but more importantly the patient's implicit procedural knowledge, his ways of being with others. The distinct qualities and consequences of these moments (now moments, 'moments of meeting') are modelled and discussed in terms of a sequencing process that they call moving along. Conceptions of the shared implicit relationship, transference and countertransference are discussed within the parameters of this perspective, which is distinguished from other relational theories and self-psychology. In sum, powerful therapeutic action occurs within implicit relational knowledge. They propose that much of what is observed to be lasting therapeutic effect results from such changes in this intersubjective relational domain'. (p. 903)
In 2002 (BCPSG, 2002), further developing their vision, the authors introduce the term 'local level' of therapeutic action:
'We believe this [local] level is an important addition and complement to traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as transference/countertransference and the unconscious. Our developmental orientation leads us to conclude that this is the level at which emotional procedures or implicit relational knowings are established and reorganised throughout life. Moreover, a great deal of the information that both analyst and patient gather about each other and their relationship derives from the implicit domain. Unless this is acknowledged, much of what transpires in an analysis will be missed. It therefore requires our most careful scrutiny in attempting to understand therapeutic action at this level. Implicit relational knowing is permeated with affective 'valuations' regarding how to proceed with others. It therefore organises attentional focus, guiding both the inference-making process and action. Through it, the past is carried along, engagement is regulated and meaning generated.
We conclude with four points: first, therapeutic change happens in small, less charged moments as well as occasionally in highly charged 'now' moments and moments of meeting; second, therapeutic change involves change in implicit relational knowing and this change occurs in the ongoing flow of each partner's relational moves at the local level; third, change in implicit relational knowing comes about by achieving more coherent and inclusive ways of being together; and finally, more coherent ways of being together come about through a process of recognition of specificity of fittedness between the two partner's initiatives.' (p. 1060)
In 2005 (BCPSG, 2005), by 'sloppiness', a concept borrowed from the theory of non-linear, dissipative systems, the authors furnished a coherent theoretical explanation for the creative character of psychoanalytic process and for the intersubjectivists' claim for analyst's freedom and spontaneity in the psychoanalytic interaction:
'We have explored the sloppiness that is an inherent property of the twoperson intersubjective dialogue at the local level. We find it to be an enormously interesting and productive aspect of a dynamical systems model of psychoanalytic treatment. It is also an essential element of the co-creative process that leads to greater intersubjective coherence. We view sloppiness not as errors or mishaps in the dialogue, but rather as a generator of potentially creative elements that may alter the direction of the dyad's evolution in unexpected, even previously unimaginable, ways.
Where do the novel elements come from in the analytic process that make it such a surprisingly specific journey ? One could say that sloppiness is to a two-person psychology what free association is to a one-person psychology. They each add the unexpected specific details. They create the surprise discoveries that push the dyad to its uniqueness. However, there is also an important difference. Free associations are assumed to lead to and from preexisting networks of meanings. Sloppiness, by contrast, is not part of any established organization, even though it, too, is influenced by the past.
Sloppiness, like free association or other unanticipated 'pop-up' events, can be used creatively only when framed within a well-established therapeutic system or within a well-functioning dyad. Without the direction and constraints of those dyadic systems, the improvisational elements can veer toward chaos...
This view contributes to the emergence of a relational theory of psychoanalysis based on a dynamical systems model and provides descriptions of how such sloppy dyadic processes work to create psychoanalytic change.' (pp. 721-722)
The writing 'The foundational level of psychodynamic meaning: Implicit process in relation to conflict, defense and the dynamic unconscious' (BCPSG, 2007) brings perhaps one of the most interesting idea advanced by this group: the roots of psychopathology, the conflicts and defenses, do not originate and do not reside in the symbolic or pre-symbolic 'psychic reality', as all of the other psychoanalytical models have been considering from the beginning, but in the implicit procedural relational level of functioning. And, there is no necessarily a need for verbal symbolic level participation in order to have psychic meaning. In the authors' words:
'Traditionally, intrapsychic entities such as conflict and defense were assumed to determine what happened at the interactive level. The interactive level was seen merely as the instantiation of such deeper forces. The authors delineate the upsidedown theoretical conception of the relationship between the supposedly 'superficial' layer of immediate interaction and the supposedly 'profound' layer of intrapsychic entities such as conflict and defense. Here they suggest that the interactive process itself is primary and generates the raw material from which they draw the generalized abstractions that they term conflicts, defenses and phantasy. Conflicts and defenses are shown to be born and reside in the domain of interaction. It follows that relational living out is the deep layer of experience, while the abstractions used to describe the repetitive aspects of these relational strategies, such as conflict and defense, are secondary descriptors of the deep level, but not the level itself, and exist further from the lived experience. These relational processes have largely been written about abstractly and even metaphorically, however, rather than in terms of specific exchanges at the local level of the interaction. Here the authors are redefining the intrapsychic as lived experience that is represented at the implicit level. They suggest that conflict and defense, as explicated in language, are useful abstractions, which are derived from the implicit level of lived interactions. However, they are secondary. The past is carried forward into the present at the level of lived experience. As such, the level of relational action is the foundation for the grasping of the psychodynamics to which the analyst will respond implicitly and interpretively. (p.1)
Developmental findings have made it clear that experiences that are stored implicitly are not impoverished events limited to sensorimotor experiences or to the impersonal realms of procedural memory discussed in the cognitive research literature. Rather they can involve highly complicated knowledge involving affective responses, expectations and thoughts. Implicit knowledge is also not necessarily more primitive. It is not replaced when language appears, nor is it necessarily transformed into language later in development (Lyons-Ruth, 1998, 1999). Rather, the implicit domain continues to grow in breadth and elaboration with age. Implicit knowledge certainly is a far larger domain of knowing about human behavior than explicit knowledge, and at all ages, not just in infancy. Even more importantly, in development, language and symbolic forms of meaning are intrinsically grounded in these early forms of implicitly represented relational experience (see Hobson, 2002, for a detailed developmental account). Appreciating the scope, sophistication and affective dimensions of implicit relational knowing is important because it changes how one views the unconscious...' (p. 5)
Moreover, in 2008 (BCPSG, 2008), in the most recent writing:
'...mind and body evolved and developed together, deeply entwined within each individual. Spoken language is not possible without the experience of movement and gesture… Equally, gesture requires language behind/within it.
...implicit and reflective-verbal are entwined and suffused with similar meaning. The distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic is necessary for academic and philosophical reasons, but subjectively the basic units of human communication are lived intentions (BCPSG, 2007). We assume and act as if the other is an embodied mind, like us, with intentions that can be multiply expressed and read. The exact form of expression is secondary to the intention.
We have mentioned several intertwinings between implicit experience and reflective-verbal that integrate the two. We note this integration is a precondition of potential and inevitable disjunctions between the two domains. Continuity of meaning across the implicit and explicit domains is discussed in this light. The reflective-verbal and implicit are not isomorphic but are necessarily deeply familiar to each other.
In the clinical situation, there will always be multiple intentions and meanings within any one act to communicate. We view such unscripted communications as emergent properties of a dynamic process comprised of three components that create a gestalt:
1. The intention is implicitly experienced.
2. A reflective-verbal version of this implicit experience is grounded in the nonverbal mental/body concepts contained in the implicit domain. The grounding is based on phylogeny, ontogeny and culture.
3. There is an inevitable disjunction between the implicit and the reflective-verbal. This is not a lack or a problem, it is just another property of the emerging gestalt.
All three come together during a process we have called the intention unfolding process. During this process, a gestalt of all three, taken together, emerges and is captured in one intuitive grasp. It is this gestalt that gives out the multiple intentions and meanings that can shift and change over ongoing and repeated contemplation.
In the real world of dialogic communication, one does not pay focal attention to the words that pass or to the conventional gestures that are not mentally inhabited or to the disjunction between them. Instead, one is focused on the meaning of the total communication and its intention. That is the phenomenological center.' (pp. 144-45)
The perspective advanced by BCPSG - the implicit relational knowing - could be seen as bridging Bowbly's attachment theory with contemporary relational-intersubjective approaches.
Nowadays, many psychoanalysts, under the pressure of clinical realities and regardless of their theoretical orientation, have started to take into consideration the intersubjective and relational perspectives. However, there are also a few who categorically deny that any 'novelties' have been brought in psychoanalysis by relational-intersubjective movement. They consider, and bring arguments from the classics' writings according to which psychoanalysis has been relational and intersubjective from the beginning. With no special intention to contradict them, we could compare this kind of claims with somebody's position who would say that Copernik did not bring anything new, because Earth has been moving around the Sun from the beginning, and arguments for that could be found in the ancient philosophers' writings.
Even though, neither Bowbly nor BCPSG authors said it explicitly and, perhaps, they have not meant it, their perspectives could have important consequences on psychoanalytic therapeutic technique. One of them could be a dramatic lost of importance of the main goal of all past and present models of psychoanalytic thinking: the transformation/translation of the primary, unconscious, implicit or procedural contents into verbal symbolic, self-reflective processes. Since both of these mental functioning levels have parallel, but not separate, ways of development and the former are the 'foundational' for the later, the therapeutic action can occur at the procedural level without verbalization. Therefore, the psychoanalytic process could/should focus primarily on the interaction at the 'local', implicit relational knowing. Here, the nature and the form of the disjunctions between these two levels, intuitively perceived by the analyst and the patient, the 'music' of each psychoanalytic encounter, constitute the central clinical intersubjective working point And this could be done with or without too much emphasis on 'working through' at the verbal symbolic level. Or, at least, if we are still doing that by tradition, it would be useful to have in mind the possibility that this kind of 'classical' technical work might not be the principal instrument for change. Interpreting, bringing insight, developing patient's symbolic self-reflecting thinking could, at most, enable him/her to keep in bail some unconvening personal implicit relational knowing, but it might be less or non-effective in bringing change in these internal procedural representations themselves. And, even if it had a certain potential for patient's growth, an increased verbal self-reflecting capacity would be only a secondary occurrence or a kind of inverse feedback, an influence of the effect on the cause. However, psychoanalysts may still keep applying the technique of 'talking cure', but more to the benefit of their professional self, in order to meet patients' expectations as evidence of the analyst's competence, to help communication with colleagues, to write psychoanalytical materials, to claim a specific of their therapeutic method and so forth.
These considerations could be seen in relation to a very common, every day observation: most of mentally 'healthy' individuals, persons functioning very well, do not necessarily have a high level of verbalsymbolic, self-reflecting mental activity. Sometimes, even the contrary seems to be the case. Usually, when asked about this apparent paradox, we come up with two main categories of explanations:

1. Those persons only appear to be healthy, in reality they do not know how 'neurotic' they are. And they all need analysis to improve their life.
2. Even if it did not hurt anybody to know more about him/herself, only some people need to develop their symbolic self-reflective thinking in order to compensate for their ineffectual implicit relational knowing. And, there are other people who do not necessarily need to symbolize too much because they are, by their 'procedural nature', healthier. In other words, they may have a good, less conflictive and resistance free foundational implicit relational knowing.

Even though, as an analyst, I should prefer to give support to the first explanation, I cannot help but admit that I have an inclination towards the second one. If not for other theoretical reasons, at least for my wish to see less ex-analysands contaminated with too much 'self-reflexive' thinking, a situation sometimes caricaturally designated as 'Woody Allen syndrome'. Accepting that the main therapeutic action is unfolding at the procedural implicit relational level, without too much possibility for technical control (or 'manipulation') from the analyst's part, what may count more would be not the analyst's technique or theory, but his/her personal way of functioning at the implicit relational level. Therefore, in order to have less Woody Allen syndromes, we need to have fewer Woody Allen type of analysts. The next question/problem would be: how can we attract into our profession those individuals who are not, and who have never been, in need to develop their self-reflective thinking in order to be able to happily live their lives ?

[1]E-mail: epad2002@yahoo.com
[2]The underlining is mine. These 'behaviour patterns, which are bred into it like the features of its anatomy and physiology' were successively assimilated with 'internal object relationships' with 'working internal models' and, recently, with 'procedural internal scenarios'.
[3]One of the best known experiment is that: A person in a hypnotic state receives the command to open his/her umbrella, next day, in the middle of the second act of a theatre representation. The person is also induced by suggestion to forget about hypnosis session. At the established moment, and in the indicated circumstances, the person does exactly what it was ordered. Asked, by some bystanders why he/she did that, the answer comes after a short moment of confusion: 'I supposed my ticket had dropped in the umbrella'. Of course, there was no ticket in the umbrella, and the subject was 'really' believing in his/her explanation.
[4]Recent research by cerebral neuroimaging indicates signs of a decisional-like activity in the specific non-symbolic (motor) arias of the human brain, up to 10 seconds before the moment of activation of the symbolic, conscious decisions making arias (Soon, C. S. et al., 2008).
[5]The only known case of non-intersubjective relationality is Sullyvan, H. S. (1953).
[6]'I would like to differentiate here between consciousness and awareness, two concepts that are often considered equivalent.'Consciousness' is the capacity to register a psychic event, to memorise it and to remember it. 'Awareness', instead, has to do with the meaning and understanding of that event, and is linked to the presence or absence of the intuitive function and to the capacity for self-observation.' (De Masi, p. 1153).
[7]The members of the Boston Change Process Study Group, listed alphabetically, are Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, M.D., Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Ph.D., Alexander C. Morgan, M.D., Jeremy P. Nahum, M.D., Louis W. Sander, M.D., and Daniel N. Stern, M.D. Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, M.D., is director of the Brazelton Center of Geneva and coauthor with Daniel Stern of The Birth of a Mother. Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Ph.D., is affiliate scholar, Boston Psychoanalytic Society, and Associate Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School. Alexander C. Morgan, M.D., is faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis; and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School at The Cambridge Hospital. Jeremy Nahum,M.D., is faculty of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis; and Consulting Psychiatrist, Family Pathways Project, The Cambridge Hospital. Louis Sander, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, University of Colorado Medical School, Boulder, and Boston University School of Medicine. Daniel N. Stern, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, University Geneva, Switzerland; and author of The Interpersonal World of the Infant and The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.

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