Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality

Includes a foreword by Nancy McWilliams

In Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality, Neil J. Skolnick takes us on a journey that traces his personal evolution from a graduate student through to his career as a relational psychoanalyst. Skolnick uniquely shares his publications and presentations that span his professional career, weaving in issues around temporality and relational psychoanalysis.

Accessible and deeply thought-provoking, this book explores the many ways our lives are pervaded and shaped by time, and how it infuses the problems that psychoanalysts work with in the consulting room. Skolnick begins each chapter with an introduction, contextualizing the papers in his own evolution as a relational analyst as well as in the broader evolution of the relational conceit in the psychoanalytic field. Following an incisive description of the realities and mysteries of time, he highlights how psychoanalysts have applied several temporal phenomena to the psychoanalytic process. The papers and presentations address an assortment of time-worn psychoanalytic issues as they have become redefined, reconfigured and re-contextualized by the application of a relational psychoanalytic perspective. It purports to chart the changes in the field and the author’s practice as, like many psychoanalysts, Skolnick explains his shifted perspective from classical to ego psychological, to relational psychoanalysis across the trajectory of his career. Finally, the author struggles to understand the contributions of time to the process of change in psychoanalytic thought and practice. This book also provides a fascinating guide to how our lives are contextualized in the invisibilities of time, illuminating the most frequent ways time influences psychoanalytic thinking and practice.

Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality will be of immense interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and therapists of all persuasions in their practice and training. It should also be of interest to philosophers, historians and scholars of psychoanalysis who have a general interest in studying the role of psychoanalysis in influencing contemporary trends of Western thought.