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To love in a committed fashion, over time, is to hope; and to hope is to impart value in an inevitably uncertain future. Both love and hope are extremely risky; a genuine hopefulness about the analytic process is not possible in any real way at the beginning but is something attained only through struggle; it takes great courage (Mitchell, 1993, p. 212)
As a graduate student, I became enamored very quickly with psychoanalysis. After several years of reading everything traditional and post-Freudian I could get my hands on, I happened unexpectedly to run across Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 1993), which I read and then reread in the same week. For me, this book was (and remains) one of the most clearly written, encompassing, and compelling portraits of psychoanalysis. Soon thereafter, when I had consumed everything its author had written, I began to write my dissertation and sought to make an exploration of his work its centerpiece. I wanted to include his latest writings in my project, and so I held my breath and called him directly to ask if he would send me any of his recent writings. To my surprise, he called back in a couple days, offered to send me a manuscript he was working on (which became Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis; Mitchell, 1997) and invited me to comment on it, as well as to send him what I had written. I was stunned when I heard the message, and played it over several times just to be sure that I had not completely imagined it. As I got to know Steve better over the next 5 years, I was always impressed by how open.