Concept
Relational matrix
Stephen Mitchell's name, in Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988), for the web of relations with others in which a person's mind takes shape and which it keeps re-creating. He meant it to replace the drive as the basic unit of psychoanalytic explanation, and to sit above the split between theories that look at actual relationships with others and theories that look at internal objects. The matrix has three dimensions that cannot be separated: the self, the other, and the patterns of interaction in the space between them. On this view what is unconscious is not repressed drive derivatives but relational configurations that were never integrated.
Development
1988
introduced by Stephen A. Mitchell
In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis Mitchell made the relational matrix (self, other and the space between) the central structure of the mind, in place of the drive. He used it to integrate interpersonal theory, British object relations and self psychology.
In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (1988)
Relations
- 1988 introduced by Stephen A. Mitchell
In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis Mitchell made the relational matrix (self, other and the space between) the central structure of the mind, in place of the drive. He used it to integrate interpersonal theory, British object relations and self psychology.
- gave rise to Relational-conflict model
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.
See also
People
References
- Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration1988Evidence for a relation