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Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black's Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought is presented as a text for students of analysis and practicing clinicians alike. Intended to “help the students see past jargon and political packaging to the experiential kernel of theoretical concepts” (p. xxii), it offers a reader-friendly exposition of a wide range of analytic thinkers. Further, it brings concepts and principles to life by providing clinical examples, primarily from the authors' own work and that of their supervisees and students.
Whether Mitchell and Black fulfill their goal of presenting a politically neutral account of analysis is more questionable. They are explicitly critical of what they consider the psychoanalytic medical establishment for promoting its own brand of analysis and discouraging the study of dissident and contemporary points of view. Thus, they write that “Most of the post-Freudian texts are written in a style that encourages a view of psychoanalysis as an esoteric, impenetrable world unto itself, its self-proclaimed riches accessible only to a select few” (pp. xx-xxi).
In a broad sense, the book is an elaboration for a student audience of the theoretical framework first presented in Greenberg and Mitchell's (1983) Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory and then elaborated in Mitchell's (1988) Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis. Interestingly, however, Freud and Beyond has strikingly few (I count only three) references to relational psychoanalysis per se. This is noteworthy in view of Mitchell's previous efforts to define relational psychoanalysis as the contemporary approach that best identifies and integrates the theoretical and technical commonalities of object relations theory, Kleinian analysis, interpersonal theory, and self psychology. Instead of explicating relational