Concept
Relational-conflict model
Stephen Mitchell's account of psychic conflict and psychopathology, set out in Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988) and taken further in Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993). It keeps conflict at the centre of psychoanalysis but moves it from a clash between drives and defences to a clash between relational ties: attachments, loyalties and identifications with significant others, formed early and pulling in different directions. People keep re-creating these familiar patterns of connection even when they bring pain, because they are the known ways of being with others. Mitchell set the model against both classical drive-conflict theory and developmental-arrest theories, which explain pathology as early needs that went unmet. In treatment the analyst becomes caught up in the patient's patterns and works with the patient, from inside the relationship, to understand them and build new ones.
Development
1988
introduced by Stephen A. Mitchell
Mitchell's own model of conflict: the clash is between relational ties and loyalties, not between drives and defences. He set it against both drive-conflict theory and developmental-arrest theory.
In Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993);Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (1988)
Relations
- 1988 introduced by Stephen A. Mitchell
Mitchell's own model of conflict: the clash is between relational ties and loyalties, not between drives and defences. He set it against both drive-conflict theory and developmental-arrest theory.
- derives from Relational matrix
Both ideas come from the same 1988 book. The conflict model applies the relational matrix to psychopathology: once mind is made of relations, conflict lies between competing relational ties.
Works
- 1988
Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration
Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration, published by Harvard University Press in 1988, is Stephen A. Mitchell's attempt to bring order to a field he saw as fragmented among competing theories. It builds on the distinction he and Jay Greenberg drew in Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory between the drive model, in which relations with others arise from and are shaped by the pursuit of drive gratification, and relational models, in which relations themselves are primary and irreducible. Mitchell argues that the drive model has outlived its usefulness, and that the relational traditions, developed piecemeal by authors who seldom recognised their shared assumptions, can be woven into one relational-conflict model: interpersonal psychoanalysis, British object relations theory, self psychology and existential psychoanalysis. In this model the mind is embedded in a relational matrix with three dimensions: the self, the other and the space between them. The book rethinks in these terms sexuality, infantilism and narcissism, the influence of early experience, the relation of past and present, the interweaving of illusion and actuality, the place of will, the repetition of painful experience, and the nature of the analytic situation and of change in analysis.
- 1993
Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis
In Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (BasicBooks, 1993), Stephen A. Mitchell argues that the field's devotion to its founder has hidden how far psychoanalysis has changed since Freud, and he describes a discipline moving beyond the limits of Freudian drive theory. Classical analysis places the patient's conflicts over sexual and aggressive impulses at its centre, inside the patient. Mitchell's version, illustrated with clinical cases, attends to the wishes and needs of both participants, analysand and analyst. It treats the tensions between their hopes and dreads, and the ways these are worked through, as the medium of therapeutic change. Drawing on object relations theories, self psychology and existential psychoanalysis, the book presents the analytic process as both personal and interpersonal. It joins two shifts in the field: a theoretical one, organised around the question of what the patient needs, and a metatheoretical one, organised around what the analyst knows, which bears on the analyst's authority in a constructivist view of the analytic situation. It also traces how the self became the central concept through which contemporary psychoanalysis addresses meaning, and considers the self as both multiple and continuous.
See also
People
References
- Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis1993Evidence for a relation
- Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration1988Evidence for a relation