Launched in 1991, Psychoanalytic Dialogues was founded on the premise that within the diverse world of psychoanalysis there had developed a set of overlapping perspectives that regarded relational configurations of self and others, real and fantasied, as the primary units of human motivation and psychodynamic explanation.

These perspectives emerged within interpersonal psychoanalysis; British object relations theories; self psychology; the empirical traditions of infancy research and child development; and certain currents of contemporary Freudian thought. This common relational model has come to provide a vitalizing framework within which clinical contributions can be situated and developed.