Lewis Aron, Ph.D., ABPP, FABP, was an American psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, internationally recognized teacher and lecturer on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis who made significant contributions to psychoanalysis, particularly within the specialty known as relational psychoanalysis. Dr. Aron was the Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in New York City. He was the founding president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and was formerly President of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. He practiced in New York where he was well known for teaching ongoing study and reading groups for professional therapists. He was board certified in psychoanalysis by the American Board of Professional Psychology and a Fellow of the American Board of Psychoanalysis. His 1996 volume A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis and his edited volume with Stephen Mitchell, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition are considered two of the essential texts in contemporary American psychoanalysis. Together with Adrienne Harris, he edited the Relational Perspectives Book Series, which has published many of the texts in the field. Dr. Aron was one of the founders of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives.
Contribution to psychoanalysis
The term "relational psychoanalysis" was first used by Greenberg and Mitchell in 1983 to bridge the traditions of interpersonal relations, as developed within interpersonal psychoanalysis and object relations, as developed within contemporary British theory. Due in large measure to the seminal work of Stephen Mitchell, the term "relational psychoanalysis" grew and began to accrue to itself many other influences and developments. Various tributaries—interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, self psychology, empirical infancy research, and elements of contemporary Freudian and Kleinian/Bionian thought—flow into this tradition, which understands relational configurations between self and others, both real and fantasized, as the primary subject of psychoanalytic investigation. Relational psychoanalysis has become the dominant form of American contemporary psychoanalysis. Lewis Aron's contributions to the field include:
a comprehensive examination of the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity.
a view of psychoanalysis that emphasizes mutual regulation and mutual recognition, even within the context of a certain necessary asymmetry of roles and responsibilities.
studies on the ethics of psychoanalysis and particularly the ethics of writing about patients.
examination of controversies in psychoanalytic education and psychoanalytic institutions.
explorations of psychoanalysis, religion, and spirituality.
systematic exploration of the historically defined distinction between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
the development of a "progressive psychoanalysis" for the twenty-first century.
