Resource Description
Based on an interview with Nancy Eichhorn in preparation for the 2012 International Body Psychotherapy conference in Cambridge, UK - she wrote it up, included her own comments and perspective and I then helped with the editing to get it to this published version: “The term 'relational' has recently achieved buzz word status. Therapists are quick to claim they are 'relational' because they see themselves as relating well to their clients and because they consider - quite rightly - that the 'quality of relationship' with their client/patient is crucial to the work. Books are written, conferences are held, workshops are offered based upon the increasingly widespread conviction that healing takes place in the relationship - 'it's the relationship that matters'. And it is indeed a precious achievement that the profession is now placing such significance on the relationship, rather than primarily on the supposedly 'correct' therapeutic theory or technique, whatever that may be. But unfortunately the apparent consensus across the profession around the centrality of the relationship in therapy is only skin-deep; the closer we look, the more apparent it becomes that being relational means profoundly different things to therapists from different approaches, so the old 'modality wars' between the approaches are alive and well, except they are now hidden and subsumed under different meanings of the term 'relational'.”
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