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In this essay, I reflect on the origins of relational psychoanalysis during my training years at the NYU Postdoctoral Program between 1983 and 1989, and the subsequent evolution of my own psychoanalytic credo in which I place the essential mutuality of the psychoanalytic process at the heart of the therapeutic action that it generates. I explore the idea that all analysis is at heart a form of mutual analysis in which personal transformation and healing is inevitably bi-directional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response to discussants Philip Bromberg and Glen Gabbard explores the relevance of a self-state perspective to my reflections (2007) on the benefits of reconsidering traditional recommendations regarding an analytic frame. The clinical and theoretical implications of Bromberg's view that the shifting choreography of a multiplicity of self-states of analyst and patient, in collision and negotiation, are implicated in the structuring and resructuring of an analytic frame, are considered. I also explore Gabbard's perspective that analysts' reliance on traditional, rigid constructions of an analytic frame no longer characterizes most contemporary work. Although I agree that relational contributions to psychoanalysis have become increasingly well established and that our more traditionally trained colleagues are beginning to grapple with and even integrate them to some degree, I nevertheless suggest that many of the traditional ways of defining and structuring a psychoanalytic frame continue to exercise a strong atavistic influence on training, practice, and the very definition of psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]