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This is Judith Mitrani’s third volume of collected papers. It follows A Framework for the Imaginary (originally published in 1996 by Jason Aronson and re-issued by Karnac in 2008) and Ordinary People and Extra-ordinary Protections: A Post-Kleinian Approach to the Treatment of Primitive Mental States (Routledge/New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2001). In addition, together with her husband Theodore Mitrani, she has edited Encounters with Autistic States: A Memorial Tribute to Frances Tustin (Jason Aronson, 1997) as well as Frances Tustin Today (New Library of Psychoanalysis, in press).
As one might infer from the titles of these books, Mitrani’s main area of interest concerns primitive mental states and their vicissitudes in ‘ordinary people’. Perhaps the best known of her early papers (Mitrani, 1993) concerned the psychoanalytic treatment of psychogenic asthma. In it she introduced the term ‘unmentalised experience’ and in much of her subsequent writing she has examined in detail the processes involved in making unmentalised experience – or, as she would say now, ‘happenings’ – possible to think about and to integrate.
Mitrani’s first analysis was with a ‘classical’ analyst, whose encouragement to find her own voice she acknowledges in Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections. Her second analyst was one of the group re-analysed by Bion when he moved to Los Angeles and similarly encouraged her to think in her own way. She has a deep familiarity with writers of the British Object Relations school; perhaps the perspective
allowed by her American background has contributed to her capacity to integrate the various strands of these writings instead of becoming unduly caught up in some of the sectarian differences. The single most important influence, on a personal level as well as on a theoretical one, is undoubtedly Frances Tustin, who was her teacher as well as becoming her friend and in whose honour she founded the Frances Tustin Memorial Trust. All these factors me