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Relationality is the most recent addition to the late Stephen Mitchell's twenty-year project of articulating a theoretical position in which the intrapsychic and the interpersonal mutually shape and enrich one another, as if they were an “endless Mobius strip” (p. 53) of the self. The book's preface (which actually has the more substantial character and function of an introduction) sets forth the goal of exploring the interface among the differing relational perspectives currently being advanced. Mitchell sees these views—each with its own provenance—as representing different dimensions of relational experience, rather than as alternative hypotheses about what relationality truly is. His overarching aim is to uncover the underlying commonalities while acknowledging the differences in these views, to set them in meaningful counterpoint with each other, and ultimately to organize them in a way that makes it easier to choose among them in the heat of the clinical moment. A related purpose is to strengthen the author's epistemological argument that relationality is ingrained in human existence “by design,” and that relational attachments are therefore more fundamental than drives in patterning internal psychic life. I found the book highly successful in achieving these goals.
The book's six essays are divided into two sections, “From Ghosts to Ancestors: The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald” and “Levels of Organization.” The first section, devoted to a rereading of Loewald's