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A special poignancy accompanies this review of Stephen A. Mitchell's Relationality, From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. It is his last work. Mitchell's recent passing leaves a palpable sense of premature and depriving loss, as this knowledgeable, engaging, and productive psychoanalyst can no longer continue on the relational path he has so fruitfully pursued.
This particular volume, like so much of Mitchell's work, is noteworthy for its sparkling originality and creativity. It is written with obvious care, great honesty, clarity, and structure. Mitchell states his purpose early on: it is to demonstrate that the great variety of relational theories and concepts current in analytic literature are not competing ideas, but rather, “interwoven dimensions of relationality” (p. xv). We are thus alerted to the direction in which the book is to go.
Mitchell attempts to follow this direction by dividing his six chapters into two sections. The first section, comprising two chapters, is an explication of the work of Hans Loewald. In the second section, Chapter Three is Mitchell's delineation of the modes of relationality (there are four such modes, hierarchically ordered). Chapter Four is an account of the vicissitudes of attachment theory, represented by Bowlby, in its encounter with psychoanalysis. That is, Mitchell recounts the split between the two, which began in Bowlby's day, and contrasts it with the current rapprochement between relationality and the new directions in attachment research. Chapter Five is a presentation of Fairbairn's work in object relations; here Mitchell contends that Fairbairn was working toward a completely new understanding, struggling between old and new paradigms. In tracing the evolution of this new idea, Mitchell notes that, as often