In Dialogue with Stephen Mitchell

It's customary at such occasions to say what a pleasure or an honour it is to be a respondent. So habitual is this pleasantry that the intended meaning of such words is bleached out, rendering the preliminary remarks simply a mannered nicety which is a prelude to the respondent's remarks. By contrast, I want to emphasize how very authentic is my delight and honour to be able to participate in this event with Stephen Mitchell in this way.

Stephen Mitchell is among two or three of the most significant North American analysts of today. His project, as I have understood it, has several parts to it. At the base of it is a passion for understanding human subjects and what we have learned about ourselves through the discipline of psychoanalysis. One strand has been to superbly explicate psychoanalytical theory and theory about the practice of psychoanalysis - I'm thinking of his first book with Greenberg, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), and his 1995 book, Freud and Beyond, with Margaret Black. These books constitute not just excellent introductions to the work of particular schools within psychoanalysis but the ways in which the various ideas that are being discussed can be thought about in concert with one another without reducing their separate idioms or stripping them of their unique and particular contribution. In this way, Mitchell has consistently shown the connections - what he might call the relationality - between theories being thought about and developed at particular moments in history and the ways in which these are not necessarily oppositional accounts but differing ways of organizing what it is possible to see and understand. Not that he is inclined to fudge the differences which can be acute. His gift, in this area of his work, is to show both the commonality and the differences between tendencies, schools of thought, bodies of knowledge. He draws out the core of their connectedness while letting their differences stand in relief to one ano