Introduction to “The Analyst's Participation: A New Look” by Jay Greenberg

In the early 1980s two largely unknown but brilliant young analysts collaborated on a book that was to become a classic in the field. The title of the book was Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Its authors were Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell. This scholarly critique of virtually the entire theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis launched a new term for the psychoanalytic lexicon. The authors used the word relational to refer to a theoretical bridge between the concept of interpersonal relations, as developed by analysts like Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Clara Thompson, and object relations theory, as it had evolved within the British tradition.

Stephen Mitchell elaborated the relational view in a number of subsequent publications, most notably in his 1988 book, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. In this influential volume, Mitchell noted that a number of other trends were entering into relational thinking, including constructivist ideas, inter subjectivity theory, some aspects of self psychology, and hermeneutics. He took pains to clarify that sexuality and aggression are both of central importance to human experience and that relational thinking does not discard sexuality and aggression as irrelevant aspects of psychological functioning. What he stressed is that relational theory provides alternative understandings of sexuality and aggression.

Shortly after the book's publication, Mitchell founded a highly successful journal, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, to offer a forum for the exchange of ideas within the emerging relational perspective. As editor of this new journal, Mitchell was singularly influential in shaping the architecture of relational psychoanalysis.

As I prepare this introduction, Stephen Mitchell's untimely death at the age of fifty-four is still very much on my mind, and a collective grief is still being worked through by psychoanalysts of all persuasions,