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In Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis the author says he wants us to think—to think more about what we are doing in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Mitchell says that late twentieth-century thought places the individual in a social, linguistic, and ecological context, and that psychoanalytic literature increasingly regards self-experience as comprising multiple and shifting selforganizations and self-states, states that are generated in interpersonal and social fields. Personal autonomy is seen by interpersonal analysts as an emergent property of interactive processes.
In this book Mitchell reworks the traditional ideal of autonomy, and confronts the traditional ideal of autonomy. He sees psychoanalysis as grounding meaning in the rich tapestry of experience that is generated in the dialectic between past and present, the conscious and the unconscious, the fantastic and the real, the given and the constructed. This grounding “entails a deepening of our understanding of the analytic relationship and its lasting residues that acknowledges rather than denies its deeply interactive nature.” Mitchell goes on to say that what we need now is a comprehensive framework for thinking about analytic interaction, that encompasses both intrapsychic and interpersonal dimensions. In actual fact, the material with which the analyst works is “always the analyst's construction of the patient's construction of the patient's point of view.”
Mitchell traces the history of psychoanalysis from the focus on the one-person psychology of Freud, where transference is seen as a temporal displacement, to the Kleinian notion of transference that involves a displacement from internal to external. Contemporary views include the idea of projective identification, which has become elaborated, particularly by some American object relations theorists, extending projective identification beyond the merely intrapsychic to include a mode of operation in interpersonal relationships that can be both n