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.