Description
The book "Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community" is about how to think about people and relationships in a different way. It is written by Gergen and it is about how to move away from individualism and towards a more relational perspective. The book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses how people have become disillusioned with individualism and how this has led to a need for a new way of thinking about people and relationships. The second part discusses how a relational perspective can be used to understand people and relationships. The third part discusses how a relational perspective can be used in different areas of life, such as family therapy, collaborative classrooms, and organizational psychology.
This book builds on two current developments in psychology scholarship and practice. The first centers on broad discontent with the individualist tradition in which the rational agent, or autonomous self, is considered the fundamental atom of social life. Critique of individualism spring not only from psychologists working in the academy, but also from communities of therapy and counseling. The second, and related development from which this work builds, is the search for alternatives to individualist understanding. Thus, therapists such as Steve Mitchell, along with feminists at the Stone Center, expand the psychoanalytic tradition to include a relational orientation to therapy. The present volume will give voice to the critique of individualism, but its major thrust is to develop and illustrate a far more radical and potentially exciting landscape of relational thought and practice that now exists. Most existing attempts to build a relational foundation remain committed to a residual form of individualist psychology. The present work carves out a space of understanding in which relational process stands prior to the very concept of the individual. More broadly, the book attempts to develop a thoroughgoing relational account of human activity. In doing so, Gergen reconstitutes 'the mind' as a manifestation of relationships and bears out these ideas in a range of everyday professional practices, including family therapy, collaborative classrooms, and organizational psychology.
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