We would like to thank all the contributors whose work has made this book possible and whose patience has made the lengthy editing process bearable.
We were, from the start of our planning this volume, greatly encouraged by Lewis Aron, PhD, who accepted this project a mere 45 minutes after we had sent him the first description, called it a “no-brainer”, and initially agreed to write a concluding chapter for it. Overcoming his untimely death may be an unsurmountable task for relational psychoanalysis as a school of thought and a community, and we miss his clear insight and profound thought in this book, too.
Michael B. Buchholz wants to express thanks to have been invited as senior research fellow to the FRIAS (Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies) in 2018. This institution grants an atmosphere of lively studying and communicating only topped by the cooperation with Professor Stefan Pfänder, who organized his stay in Freiburg, Christopher Mahlstedt, Elke Schumann, and Oliver Ehmer.
Further, Michael wants to express a deep “thank you!” to Professor Dr. Dorothea Huber (Munich and IPU Berlin), who granted access to the audio tapes of the “Munich Psychotherapy Study”. My collaborators, especially Marie-Luise Alder, Florian Dreyer, and Michael Franzen (formerly Dittmann), carefully transcribed 45 of these sessions and created the basis for a comparison between psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and psychodynamic conversation in our CEMPP-Project (Conversation analysis of Empathy-Psychotherapy Process). This project, then, was part of our PICOR-Network (Psychoanalytic Interdisciplinary Network for Conversation Research) where Prof. Dr. Gabriele Brandstetter, Prof. Dr. Christoph Wulf (both from Freie Universität, Berlin), and Prof. Dr. Andreas Hamburger, our colleague from IPU, continuously cooperated for more than five years in a qualitative multi-method project of analysing interviews with holocaust survivors, school disputes, dance projects by Pina Bausch, a video-taped child therapy, and other audio- or video-taped material. Jasmine Bleimling, Veronika Heller, and Ingrid Kellermann contributed with wonderful ideas for the analyses of balance, rhythm, and resonance. Sometimes we were full of enthusiasm about the richness and detailed micro-perspectives of e.g. analyses of movement, as they were developed in the science of dance and nobody in psychotherapy process research had ever heard of it. However, sometimes the psychotherapists in our sessions, and conversation analysts, were not lazy in contributing their views. It was a new multi-method experience of an excellent quality. We were able to present results of this singular cooperation over many years and in two PICOR-conferences in 2015 and 2016. A German publication followed in Paragrana, 2018.
We are grateful to Jay Frankel, PhD, for being always available for advice and feedback, and to our former students Shira Dushy and Julianne Walther, who saved us much time by performing thorough literature searches and unifying references lists.
Many thanks also to the Routledge editorial team, especially Kate Hawes and Hannah Wright, for their guidance and patience.
We also thank Taylor & Francis for their permissions to reprint the following:
Salman Akhtar’s chapter “Listening to silence” from his book “Psychoanalytic Listening. Methods, Limits, and Innovations,” published by Karnac in 2012.
Donna Orange’s chapter “Silence in phenomenology: Dream or nightmare?” from her book “Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics. Learning to Hear”, published by Routledge in 2019.
Elsa Roningstam paper “Cultural function and psychological transformation in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy,” published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2006, 87(5), 1277–1295.