A conversation with:
Joyce Slochower

Winnicott's notion of "holding" poses a great challenge to the relational approach.  The relational emphasis on analytic mutuality collides with the vision of a passive, regressed patient held by a parental analyst in a highly asymmetrical relationship.

Joyce Slochower’s relational holding model bridged the gap between relational and Winnicottian thinking.  She theorized holding’s intersubjective element while also explicitly addressing patients’ need for alone experience and privacy within relational space. "Central to a relational take on holding" writes Slochower "is the assumption that holding isn’t something we do “for” or “to” our patient; it’s an experience that’s co-created by the analytic dyad. Nor is holding limited to work around dependence; the need for holding can emerge around hate, narcissism, or intense reactivity to injury with all kinds of patients.  We hold when we do our best to bracket (i.e., set aside without disavowing or dissociating) those aspects of our subjectivity that would disrupt our patient’s (partially illusory) sense of us" (2021, 168).

Here are some of the questions that will be discussed:

Is there a place for regression in relational therapy?

Does “holding” foreclose the analyst’s separate subjectivity?

What is holding’s effect on painful affect states like shame?

When and how does holding evolve in the direction of mutuality?

What do we do when a patient's demanding neediness feels suffocating?

What constitutes therapeutic action from a Relational-Winnicottian perspective?

Slochower will illustrate these themes using clinical vignettes