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There was a time in my development when I looked forward to personal syntheses and transformations of clinical practices. These days, however, I confess that a certain amount of jaded cynicism has entered my appraisal of things and ideas that are considered new, and I am often filled with dread when I am asked to review such new works as Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, for I have seen new cognitivists turn out to be latter-day essentialists. I have seen scientists and psychoanalytic theorists treat classical psychoanalysis as though it were some stable unity. Dangerous as it is to assume that any science has a unitary and fixed epistemology, I wonder why we need to preserve that myth. Serious reading of much of contemporary human or natural sciences often reveals a regular alternation between the real and the contingent, essences and their trajectories, rationalism and empiricism, modernism and postmodernism. Stephen Mitchell's new book, however, gave me cause to be more hopeful than otherwise. First, let us encounter him and read his promise to radicalize aspects of psychoanalytic practices in some detail.
The premise of Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis is that the practice of psychoanalysis has changed from Freud's day to ours. It is Mitchell's view that it has changed “more radically than is generally acknowledged and that the seeming self-containment of psychoanalysis tends to obscure those changes” (p. 7). In this regard, Mitchell suggests that “many fragments of the nineteenth-century features of Freud's original contributions remain, alongside ideas and concerns that he could never have thought or envisioned” (p. 7). He wants to revisit the dialectic of drive theory and a relational model on which he has previously written in order to extend and develop a new and composite relational view of psychoanalysis. He wants to write about the experiences of hope