Book
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.
Main ideas
- The mind is fundamentally relational, a view on which the work of Loewald, Fairbairn, Bowlby and Sullivan converges.
- Hans Loewald's thought, on language and reality and on drives and objects, is read as a foundation of the relational perspective.
- Relatedness operates through four modes arranged in an interactional hierarchy: what people do with each other, affective permeability, self-other configurations, and intersubjectivity.
- Attachment theory is brought into dialogue with relational psychoanalysis and placed within this hierarchy of modes.
- Fairbairn's concept of object-seeking is examined as a notion that stands between paradigms.
- In the analytic relationship, intersubjectivity calls for a stance between expressiveness and restraint: responsiveness joined to responsible restraint.
What it shows
Harry Stack Sullivan influenced Stephen A. Mitchell
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.
Ronald Fairbairn influenced Stephen A. Mitchell
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.
Hans Loewald influenced Stephen A. Mitchell
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.
John Bowlby influenced Stephen A. Mitchell
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.