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.