You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
IN 1991 emerged the first issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, the journal that Stephen Mitchell had conceived and founded to give expression to relational perspectives at a time when they constituted “if not voices in the wilderness, certainly nonmainstream viewpoints” (Mitchell, 1996, p. 1). On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, by which time classical Freudian theory's hegemony was over and it was relational thinking that was beginning to resemble a new mainstream, Mitchell expressed an anxiety and a challenge: “It is most important that this vitalizing conceptual framework [of relational thinking] be neither degraded into a monolithic model with a set of technical formulas, nor thinned out into a shallow environmentalism.” His recommendation resembled a return to the repressed: “In terms of theory, there is a need for relational authors to address more directly those domains of experience with which classical Freudian theory was most centrally concerned: sexuality, aggression, the body, constitution.… With respect to clinical technique … new thinking about the principles governing clinical judgment … to address itself to the ways in which the analyst's experience can be brought to bear, both through expression and in restraint, on furthering and deepening the analytic process” (p. 2). Mitchell was already engaged in the thinking-through of Kleinian technique that was to appear as Influence and Autonomy (1997), a work mostly concerned with matters of knowing. These present books, Relationality (2000) and Can Love Last? (2002)—one theoretical and professionally oriented, the other discursive and philosophical and directed to the general reader—are more about feeling and motivation. Together they constitute his last testament and response to his own challenge.