It's the stupid relationship

Abstract

Relational psychoanalysis promises to connect the personal and the political, and so poses a particularly painful challenge to 'Left Lacanians'. It seems to force a choice between the 'Left' and 'Lacanian' sides of our practice. It rubs at a sore point in Lacanian work, at a point of uneasy alliance between radical politics on the one hand and, on the other, the one-to-one frame of abstracted, individualised and limited horizons of change in the consulting room. I take up some of the questions that the relational turn poses for us on the Left, which I think is where much of the appeal of this turn is now, and for us Lacanians who are sometimes on the Left as well. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.