Stephen A. Mitchell (1946-2000)

Stephen A. Mitchell, Ph.D., the founder and first Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and a former member of the North American Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, died in his New York City apartment, apparently of heart failure, on 21 December 2000. This sudden, premature death aroused intense shock and pain among Steve's numerous colleagues, friends, students and admirers, in New York City and around the world.

Steve was born on 23 July 1946 in Manhattan. About a year later, his parents—Stanley, an accountant, and Lillian, a legal secretary—moved to nearby New Jersey, where he grew up in Ridgefield and later in Bergenfield. His brother, Richard, was born when Steve was five. Their maternal grandparents, and several uncles, aunts and cousins, all lived nearby and met frequently. The family was Jewish, close-knit, secular, and very involved in political and intellectual issues, about which they often entered into heated arguments. Steve's favourite uncle was a communist, and spent the McCarthy years in hiding (Drescher, 1994). The connection between this family background and his own radical views in psychoanalysis was clear to Steve (we used to discuss it as one of our commonalities).

Steve was an outstanding student, a successful athlete (he excelled above all in tennis) and a fine pianist. At 16 he moved to the Horace Mann High School in New York City (where his peer and future friend Thomas Ogden also studied), and in spite of the stressful competition he did very well, earning himself admission to Yale University.

Steve thrived in the deep and broad intellectual atmosphere at Yale. He was attracted to psychology but bored by experimental psychology, and chose to major in a unique interdisciplinary honours programme, ‘History: the Arts and Letters’, which explored intellectual and literary development from the end of the middle ages to the twentieth century. Love for knowledge and breadth of perspective were to characterise all