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The discourses of psychoanalysis are continuously expanding, currently including voices immersed in diversity, difference, and uncertainty. Even those who prefer a more traditional, conservative stance and metatheoretical approach, the canon if you will, are involved in debates related to our views of culture, people, and treatment. Postmodernism is in the air or has created it. One of the foremost scholars and clinical thinkers in the category we signify “contemporary psychoanalysis” is Stephen A. Mitchell. In his most recent text Mitchell continues his ongoing project to (re)define the analytic enterprise in regard to its relational components. As with his previous texts, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis and Object Relations and Psychoanalytic Theory, which he co-edited with J. Green-berg, he focuses on the relational aspects of the psychoanalytic situation, not as they emerge but rather how they contextualize and define all that transpires within that space. Although Mitchell's writing style is matter of fact, logical, and even tempered, the words and the ideas explode psychoanalysis as we have known it and provide a radical reconstruction and redefinition of analysis, therapy, and change. To those of us who struggle with doctrines that create oppression, dogmatism, and categorization, he reads like a breath of fresh air, creating discourses that allow for a more liberated discussion of what we see day in and day out in our consulting rooms. In fact, the signifier consulting room takes on a different set of meanings, textures, and feels. For others, he contaminates the purity of psychoanalysis, reducing it to “therapy.”
Hope and Dread is divided into various sections in which Mitchell describes some of the changes that have taken place in analytic metatheory, clinical practice, and the view of the self. He organizes some of these changes into coherent, theoretical narratives that do not erase randomness and fluidity but attempt to avoid total chaos and fragme