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.