Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis: Stephen A. Mitchell. Hillsdale, NJ/London: The Analytic Press, 1997. 292 pp.

Stephen Mitchell has been in the forefront of those theorists who construe the analyst's position in the psychoanalytic situation to be fundamentally interactive, irreducibly subjective, and of significant influence upon the form and expression of the patient's transference, conflicts, and associations. While his views have presented analysts with new ways of looking at relational factors in the analytic dyad, their contribution to the deconstruction of classical assumptions about the analyst's stance raises some very serious questions for our theory of technique. If the analyst is as deeply embedded in the analytic relationship as authors such as Mitchell maintain, objectivity and neutrality are impossible for the analyst to achieve. Should they then be discarded as technical goals toward which the analyst aspires? If they are discarded, with what concept will we replace neutrality as the cornerstone of our listening stance? Without neutrality, how are we to safeguard or even understand the conditions needed to protect the patient's autonomy?

Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis is Mitchell's attempt to address these questions. His answers rest with an approach to psychoanalytic practice that seeks neither to minimize nor deny the analyst's influence on the patient. Rather, Mitchell wishes to contain the potential for the negative impact of unintended influence and maximize the potential for positive, intended influence by confronting the existence and