Within the psychoanalytic literature, the past several decades have witnessed an explosion of new data, concepts, and theories bearing on the myriad ways in which people relate to, interact with, and, in their interior structures, are even composed of, each other. These contributions have emerged from various traditions and have been cast in different terminologies. Attachment, object-seeking, intersubjectivity, field theory, systems theory, the interpersonal field, "now moments," and "relational moves" figure prominently among the terms that have been invoked to describe different facets of the relational matrix within which human experience transpires. Despite this profusion of overlapping ideas and concerns, however, there has been little systematic effort at critical synthesis.
It is the need for just such synthesis that animates Stephen A. Mitchell, a major architect of what has come to be known as "relational psychoanalysis." In previous books, Mitchell has contributed to naming, defining, and elaborating the relational turn in psychoanalysis both in theory and in clinical practice. Now, in Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity, Mitchell provides a broad integrative framework for understanding the relationships among recent psychoanalytic concepts that delineate various aspects of human relatedness.
Mitchell begins with a thorough examination of the seminal work of Hans Loewald, which he draws on to develop a framework for housing different psychoanalytic concepts according to their respective modes or levels of organization. He goes on to explore the relationship between the rich research tradition on attachment that has grown out of John Bowlby's work and the theoretical and clinical insights embodied in W. R. D. Fairbairn's object relations theory. Ever appreciative of the radical implications of Fairbairn's theory, he argues against the dilution of Fairbairn's vision in recent "mixed models" theorizing. Mitchell concludes by employing his framework of relationality to explore the complex workings of love and hate on both sides of the analytic relationship and the clinical choices with which these workings confront the clinician on a daily basis. Here, as in his previous writings, Mitchell espouses a clinical approach equally notable for its responsiveness and its responsible restraint.
Out of Mitchell's integrative agenda emerges a comprehensive examination of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis that systematizes its components and documents its indebtedness to the various traditions on which it has drawn. For Mitchell, it is the voices of Loewald, Bowlby, Fairbairn, and H. S. Sullivan in particular that converge in apprehending the fundamental relationality of mind. A model of wide-ranging and judicious scholarship infused with clinical wisdom and originality of conception, Relationality "signals a new height in Mitchell's always illuminating writing" (Nancy Chodorow) and marks the "coming of age" of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis (Peter Fonagy).