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As I read the Introduction to this wonderful book, a sad realization slowly washed over me that this would be the last new book I would read by Steve Mitchell. Many of us continue to grieve over Steve's abrupt death, but his book reminds us that our work—and life, living, and loving—go on. In many respects, Mitchell's last book is most appropriate as an author's final work. It tackles a topic that is a source of struggle and challenge for those on both sides of the couch. It is also written for an educated lay audience, providing an excellent model for how we might translate psychoanalytic insights into a common vernacular, accessible to thinking and curious people outside our discipline. But perhaps most of all, Mitchell's book is an expression of love. From the Dedication to his wife and daughters to the Author Notes on the back jacket cover, Mitchell's love for others and for his profession reminds all of us about what is most important, both within and certainly beyond the consulting room.
There are many ways to organize a book review, especially when the author is as dynamic and nuanced as Mitchell. Rather than a chapter-by-chapter commentary, I highlight what appears to me as the main ideas that both capture much of the best that psychoanalysis offers to the topic as well as point toward fresh ways of envisioning love and passionate relationships. Mitchell asserts that from Freud's time to our own, love and desire have had a conflictual and often mutually exclusive relationship: where one is foreground the other tends to lurk unnoticed in the background of experience. Both love and desire play pivotal, though often competing, roles in our romantic lives. Mitchell worries that, at the turn of this century, we are at risk of losing a way to balance love and desire, which he suggests contributes to much of the pain and loss that many people feel when long-term romantic relationships deteriorate. He reminds us of Freud's (1912/1958) underutilized insights into psyc