James Baldwin and Relationships That Heal

What Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and relational psychotherapy can teach us about becoming ourselves

James Baldwin is often remembered as a writer who confronted America with uncomfortable truths.

He wrote about race, sexuality, identity, violence, shame and injustice. But beneath all of these subjects ran another, perhaps even more fundamental, concern: love.

What does it mean to love another person? What prevents us from loving? What happens when we cannot accept ourselves? And what might become possible when we are able to see another person—and ourselves—with greater honesty and compassion?

Nicholas Boggs's Baldwin: A Love Story offers an intriguing way into these questions (Boggs, 2025).

Rather than treating Baldwin's relationships as peripheral to his development as a writer, Boggs places them near the centre of the story. The biography explores four of the most formative relationships in Baldwin's life—with the painter Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar and Yoran Cazac.

For a psychotherapist, this is fascinating.

Because Baldwin's life raises a question that lies close to the heart of psychotherapy:

How do we become ourselves in relationship with other people?

The self is not an island

Psychologist Kenneth Gergen explores a related question in his book Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (Gergen, 2009).

Gergen challenges the familiar idea that the individual is fundamentally a separate, autonomous self who subsequently enters into relationships with other people.

He proposes something more radical: relationship is not simply something added to the self. Our ways of thinking, feeling, knowing and even understanding who we are emerge within relationship.

In other words, perhaps we do not first become ourselves and then enter into relationships.

Perhaps we become ourselves through relationships.

This is an idea with profound implications for psychotherapy.

It shifts the question from simply asking:

Who are you?

to asking:

Who do you become in relationship?

And perhaps even:

Who might you become in a different kind of relationship?

Baldwin's life provides a remarkably vivid human illustration of these questions.

The young Baldwin and Beauford Delaney

When James Baldwin was a teenager, he met the painter Beauford Delaney in Greenwich Village.

Delaney became a mentor, friend and what Baldwin described as a kind of spiritual father. Their relationship continued for decades.

The significance of Delaney was not simply that he encouraged a young Baldwin to become a writer.

Delaney embodied a possibility.

Here was a Black artist living according to his own vision. Baldwin encountered a world of art, music, creativity and unconventionality that was different from the world he had known.

The young Baldwin encountered not simply another person, but another way of being.

And that matters psychologically.

Sometimes another person sees something in us before we are capable of seeing it ourselves.

A child discovers that she is funny because someone laughs with delight at her jokes.

A young person discovers that he is intelligent because someone takes his questions seriously.

Someone who has always felt awkward discovers that there are people with whom they can be completely at ease.

Someone who has learned to hide a part of themselves discovers that another person is not frightened by it.

The other person does not necessarily give us this quality.

They help make it possible for it to emerge.

Who do you become with me?

This is also a useful question in psychotherapy.

We can easily become preoccupied with what is inside a client.

What is the diagnosis?

What is the attachment style?

What is the defence?

What happened in childhood?

What belief is driving the behaviour?

These questions can be useful. But a relational perspective adds another dimension.

Who does this person become in relationship?

Who do they become when they feel criticized?

Who do they become when someone withdraws?

Who do they become when they are loved?

Who do they become when they are afraid of being abandoned?

Who do they become when someone disagrees with them?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who might they become in a relationship that makes something different possible?

This is where Gergen's idea of relational being becomes clinically interesting.

The therapist is not simply an observer looking into the client's psychological world.

The therapist is part of the relational field in which something is happening.

The client is experiencing this particular therapist.

The therapist is experiencing this particular client.

And together they are creating something that could not exist independently of the relationship.

The relationship that heals

There is a longstanding idea in psychotherapy that it is the relationship that heals.

Different schools of therapy explain this in different ways. Carl Rogers emphasized empathy, genuineness and acceptance. Attachment-based approaches emphasize the experience of a secure relationship. Relational approaches focus explicitly on what happens between therapist and client.

Despite their differences, these traditions share an important insight:

The therapeutic relationship is not merely the setting in which therapy happens. It is part of what makes change possible.

This matters because many of the difficulties people bring to therapy are relational difficulties.

Someone may have learned that expressing anger causes people to leave.

Someone else may have learned that vulnerability invites humiliation.

Another person may have discovered that the safest way to maintain a relationship is to suppress their own needs.

Someone may desperately want intimacy while simultaneously becoming frightened when another person gets too close.

These patterns can become so familiar that they begin to feel like personality.

I'm just an angry person.

I'm too needy.

I can't trust anyone.

I'm independent. I don't need anybody.

This is simply who I am.

A relational perspective invites a different question:

What happened between you and other people that made this way of being necessary?

And then:

Is it still necessary?

Therapy as a new relational experience

This is where psychotherapy can become more than insight.

A client becomes angry with the therapist—and the therapist remains present.

The client disagrees—and the relationship survives.

The client admits something shameful—and the therapist does not recoil.

The client says, "I'm not sure I trust you," and the therapist becomes curious rather than defensive.

These are not merely conversations about relationships.

They are relational experiences.

And relational experiences can create new possibilities.

Perhaps someone who has always experienced anger as destructive can discover that anger can be expressed without destroying the relationship.

Perhaps someone who has always equated vulnerability with weakness can discover that vulnerability can coexist with dignity.

Perhaps someone who has always organized their life around being what other people need can begin to ask:

What do I need?

The therapist does not necessarily teach these lessons directly.

The relationship itself may provide the experience.

This is close to what Gergen describes as relational recovery: psychotherapy as an opportunity to develop more viable ways of relating, rather than simply repairing something presumed to be defective inside an isolated individual (Gergen, 2009).

Love is more difficult than approval

This brings us back to Baldwin.

His idea of love was not sentimental.

Baldwin's writing suggests that love did not mean approving of everything another person did. It did not mean avoiding conflict, protecting someone from difficult truths or pretending that harm had not occurred.

Love could require seeing another person very clearly.

That is a demanding idea.

It is also important in psychotherapy.

There is a difference between accepting a person and approving of everything they do.

A therapist can accept a client deeply while still challenging them.

In fact, challenge may become possible precisely because the relationship communicates:

I am not abandoning you because I am telling you the truth.

This may be one of the most difficult forms of love.

To see someone clearly without reducing them to what you see.

To recognize someone's destructive pattern without deciding that the person is the pattern.

To hold someone accountable without withdrawing your regard for them.

Baldwin understood that love and truth belong together.

Psychotherapy has much to learn from that.

The relationships that make us larger—and smaller

Baldwin's life also reminds us that relationships do not always enlarge us.

Some relationships constrict us.

Some make us anxious.

Some make us perform.

Some make us smaller.

Others awaken possibilities that had been dormant.

Boggs's biography does not present Baldwin's intimate life as a simple story of romantic fulfilment. His relationships involved longing, disappointment, ambiguity, intimacy and loss. His desire for connection existed alongside his need for solitude and the demands of his creative life (Boggs, 2025).

This complexity is important.

A relational view is not the same thing as saying that relationships are always good for us.

It means that relationships participate in who we become.

We may carry one version of ourselves into one relationship and discover another version with someone else.

Gergen's concept of "multi-being" is useful here: our participation in different relationships opens different possibilities for who we can be (Gergen, 2009).

This is something therapists see constantly.

The person who is confident at work may feel helpless at home.

The person who appears detached may be deeply frightened of losing someone.

The person who seems controlling may be terrified of being insignificant.

The person who is accommodating in one relationship may become surprisingly assertive in another.

Which is the "real" person?

Perhaps the question itself is misleading.

The therapist as witness

The therapeutic relationship therefore occupies an unusual place.

It is intimate, but it is not friendship.

It is purposeful, but it is not a transaction.

The therapist is not simply there to provide advice or techniques.

The therapist becomes a witness to the client's experience.

Someone who has felt unseen may discover what it is like to be listened to carefully.

Someone who expects judgment may discover that difficult feelings can be spoken aloud without being condemned.

Someone who believes that closeness always leads to loss may experience a relationship in which closeness and separateness can coexist.

And sometimes the therapist sees something in the client that the client cannot yet see in themselves.

Not because the therapist knows the client's "true self."

But because another person's way of relating can help make a previously inaccessible part of the self more available.

This brings us back to Baldwin and Delaney.

Delaney did not create Baldwin.

But his presence in Baldwin's life helped create conditions in which a particular Baldwin could emerge.

That distinction matters.

Perhaps psychotherapy works in a similar way.

The therapist cannot manufacture the person the client will become.

But the relationship can help make something possible.

We do not become ourselves alone

James Baldwin spent much of his life thinking and writing about love.

His life also demonstrates how complicated love can be. Love can involve longing and disappointment, intimacy and distance, recognition and loss. It can enlarge us, but it can also expose the places where we are most vulnerable.

Perhaps this is why Baldwin's relationships are so interesting to psychotherapists.

Gergen's concept of relational being challenges the idea that we are essentially separate individuals who subsequently enter into relationships. We are profoundly shaped by the relationships in which we participate (Gergen, 2009).

Baldwin's life gives that idea a human face.

The young Baldwin encountered Beauford Delaney at a formative moment in his life. Delaney did not simply tell him who he was. His way of seeing and relating to Baldwin helped make another Baldwin possible—the artist, the writer, the man beginning to imagine a life beyond the boundaries he had inherited (Boggs, 2025).

Perhaps that is one of the most important things a therapeutic relationship can offer.

Not an answer to the question:

Who are you?

But an experience that allows the client to ask:

Who might I become in a relationship like this?

Healing, then, may not always begin with changing ourselves.

Sometimes it begins with experiencing ourselves differently with another person.

Someone sees us differently.

We discover something different about ourselves.

And gradually, what was possible in one relationship begins to become possible elsewhere.

We do not become ourselves alone.

We become ourselves in relationship.

And sometimes, the relationship that heals is the one in which we finally discover that there are more possibilities for who we can be than we had imagined.

References

Boggs, N. (2025). Baldwin: A love story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Gergen, K. J. (2009). Relational being: Beyond self and community. Oxford University Press.