Person
Stephen A. Mitchell
American psychologist and psychoanalyst, the leading figure in the founding of relational psychoanalysis. Trained at the William Alanson White Institute, he wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) with Jay Greenberg, which sorted psychoanalytic theories into a drive model and a relational model. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988) he drew interpersonal psychoanalysis, British object relations theory and self psychology together around the idea of a relational matrix, in which relations with others, not drives, are the basic stuff of mental life. He founded the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 1990 and the Relational Perspectives book series, and helped create the relational track of New York University's postdoctoral program; the international relational association founded in 2001, after his early death, grew out of his work.
Ideas
- 1983 introduced Relational psychoanalysis
Mitchell and Jay Greenberg first used "relational" as the name of a family of theories in their 1983 book. Mitchell then made it the name of a school: his 1988 integration, the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1990), the Relational Perspectives book series and the relational track at NYU's postdoctoral programme.
- 1983 introduced Drive/structure and relational/structure models
With Greenberg, Mitchell drew the line between theories in which relations with others serve the drives and theories in which relations come first. That division became the founding frame of the relational school.
- 1988 introduced Relational matrix
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.
- 1988 introduced Relational-conflict model
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.
Influence
Affinity
- 1983 collaborated with Jay Greenberg
Both trained at the William Alanson White Institute and together wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), the comparative survey that set out the drive and relational models. Later they parted ways on whether drive still has a place.
- 1999 collaborated with Lewis Aron
Aron worked alongside Mitchell in the New York relational group. Both were among the founders of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and together they edited Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (1999), the collection of the school's founding papers.
- influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan
Mitchell trained in the interpersonal tradition at the White Institute, which Sullivan co-founded. Sullivan's interpersonal theory is one of the two roots of the relational model he and Greenberg described, and one of the strands his 1988 integration draws together.
- influenced by Ronald Fairbairn
Fairbairn's view that libido is object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking, is a cornerstone of the relational model. In Relationality Mitchell built on Fairbairn's idea of a self made of many internal self–other configurations.
- influenced by Hans Loewald
In his last book, Relationality, Mitchell drew on Loewald's account of the original undifferentiated unity of infant and mother. He read Loewald as a bridge between drive theory and relational thinking.
- influenced by John Bowlby
Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity draws on Bowlby's attachment theory. Mitchell took it as evidence that the need for connection is primary and not derived from drives.
Works
- 1983
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell's book, published by Harvard University Press in 1983, compares the major psychoanalytic theories according to one question: where each places a person's relations with others. The authors distinguish two basic models. In the drive/structure model, which descends from Freud, relations with others are generated and shaped by the need to gratify drives. In the relational/structure model, relations are primary and cannot be reduced to anything more basic. The book reads Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis and the British object relations theories of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip as radical alternatives to drive theory. It reads the ego psychology of Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson and Kernberg as a strategy of accommodation, which widens drive theory to take object relations in. Kohut and Sandler are treated as mixed-model strategies that combine elements of both. A final chapter follows the divergence between the two models into debates on diagnosis and clinical technique.
- 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.
- 1995
Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought
Freud and Beyond, by Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black (BasicBooks, 1995), is an introductory survey of psychoanalytic thought after Freud, written for clinicians and for general readers interested in psychoanalysis as a treatment and as a cultural creation. Starting from the observation that Freud's ideas have entered everyday psychological vocabulary while psychoanalysis itself has changed considerably over the following decades, it presents each major school through its leading figures: Freud and the classical tradition, ego psychology, Harry Stack Sullivan and interpersonal psychoanalysis, Melanie Klein and the contemporary Kleinians, Fairbairn, Winnicott and the British object relations school, Erikson and Kohut on identity and the self, and the Freudian revisionists Kernberg, Schafer, Loewald and Lacan. It places each thinker's contribution within the history of psychoanalytic ideas and illustrates the theories with clinical examples. Two closing chapters take up current controversies in theory and in technique. A Hebrew translation by Amit Fachler, edited and introduced by Meir Berger, was published by Tola'at Sfarim in 2006.
- 1997
Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis
Stephen A. Mitchell's 1997 book, published in the Relational Perspectives series, examines psychoanalysis after its shift from a one-person model of the mind to a two-person, interactive and relational view of the analytic situation. Once the analyst is understood as a participant in the interaction, the analyst's influence on the patient can no longer be avoided. The book asks how analysts can still protect the patient's autonomy and integrity, given how far they personally shape the process. Mitchell builds a critical, comparative framework for the many concepts recently proposed to describe what passes between analyst and analysand. He draws on the interpersonal and Kleinian traditions, on object relations theory and on contemporary Freudian thought. Taking the problem of influence as his guiding thread, he reconsiders the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, the ideals of anonymity and neutrality, the analyst's intentions, the nature of analytic knowledge and authority, and the clinical questions that gender and sexual orientation raise in a postmodern climate. He ends with a personal synthesis.
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- 1999
Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition
Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (The Analytic Press, 1999) is volume 14 of the Relational Perspectives Book Series. In it, Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron collect seventeen papers that they present as the founding texts of relational psychoanalysis. The publisher's account sets the volume against a broad change in American psychoanalysis over the preceding fifteen years. In theory, the field turned from classical formulations grounded in Freud's drive theory toward models of mind and development built on object relations. In practice, it turned from the classical principles of neutrality, abstinence and anonymity toward an interactive view of the analytic situation, with the relationship and its reciprocal affective currents at the centre. The book traces these changes to a group of analysts who sought to integrate interpersonal psychoanalysis, British object relations theories and psychoanalytic feminism. They never declared themselves a school, but they produced a distinct and influential tradition of thought and clinical practice. The contributors are Eigen, Hoffman, Stern, Chodorow, Greenberg, Mitchell, Benjamin, Ghent, Aron, Davies and Frawley, Harris, Pizer, Stolorow and Atwood, Bromberg, Renik, Spezzano and Ogden. Among their subjects are the analyst's subjectivity and the patient's experience of it, recognition and intersubjectivity, unformulated experience, narcissism, masochism and surrender, dissociation in the treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, gender, paradox and the analytic third. The editors introduce each paper and place it in its historical context, and each author adds a new afterword on how their thinking has developed since. A Hebrew translation appeared in 2013.
- 2000
Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity
Stephen A. Mitchell's last book, published by the Analytic Press in 2000, two months before his death. It draws together the ideas that make up the relational view of human experience. It traces how the relational perspective arose in psychoanalysis through the work of Hans Loewald, Ronald Fairbairn, John Bowlby and Harry Stack Sullivan, whose approaches converge on the basic relationality of the mind. The first part, "From Ghosts to Ancestors", reads Loewald's psychoanalytic vision through his ideas on language and reality and on drives and objects. The second part, "Levels of Organization", sets out an interactional hierarchy of four modes of relatedness: what people actually do with each other, affective permeability, self-other configurations, and intersubjectivity. It then uses this hierarchy to examine attachment theory, Fairbairn's notion of object-seeking, and intersubjectivity in the analytic relationship. Drawing on attachment theory, intersubjectivity theory and systems theory, Mitchell argues for a clinical stance that balances the analyst's responsiveness with responsible restraint, between expressiveness and restraint.
References
- Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory1983Evidence for a relation
- Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration1988Evidence for a relation
- Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis1993Evidence for a relation
- Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity2000Evidence for a relation
- Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition1999Evidence for a relation