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Stephen Mitchell is perhaps most familiar to the British audience as the co-author, with Jay Greenberg, of Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, published in 1983. It is in the decade since the publication of that text that Mitchell has emerged a one of the leading figures in contemporary American psychoanalysis. He has articulated a relational point of view and, within this framework, has offered some of the most provocative challenges to our thinking, whether we work with adults or children. These challenges are eloquently delineated in his 1988 book Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis and more recently in Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis.
Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis is organized around two questions: what does the patient need? and what does the analyst know? Mitchell explores how our thinking about the answers to these questions has changed dramatically since Freud's initiation of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Mitchell also examines the strategies that psychoanalytic writers have employed, historically and currently, to integrate new psychoanalytic ideas into the main body of psychoanalytic knowledge. Utilizing a framework in which the centrality of drives is shifted to that of relationships, Mitchell outlines and develops how a selective integration of our theoretically diverse, yet potentially complementary psychoanalytic views, may be possible.1
The book is set out in three sections, the first addressing what Mitchell sees as the revolution in theory and our subsequent crisis of confidence in psychoanalytic theory. He argues that new psychoanalytic thinking is not merely evolutionary, that is, an expansion or elaboration of ‘basic’ psychoanalytic ideas. Contemporary theory is not a ‘series of footnotes’ to Freud, but, rather, the pluralistic nature of our community differs from that of Freud's time, and there are now many different perspectives on what psychoanalysis is. Emphasized throughout is Mitchell's view that what has occurred is quite revol