www.psychspace.com心理学空间网1. Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought, by Stephen A. Mitchell, Margaret J. Black, Basic Books, 1996 (精神分析史 accessible via www.questia.com)
2. My Psychoanalytic Journey, by Stephen A. Mitchell, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 24, 2004 (accessible via questia)
2. My Psychoanalytic Journey
by Stephen A. Mitchell
LIKE MANY IN THE FIEED OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, I WAS FIRST DRAWN to the ideas of Freud himself. I don't remember how I came across Freud's writings, but I spent a good part of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school devouring the five-volume edition of Freud's collected papers. I went to college looking for Freud in psychology courses, only to discover rats (not the Rat Man). I ended up with a wonderful cross-disciplinary major, "History, the Arts & Letters," in which I learned a great deal about structural, comparative approaches to ideas. My major interests, in addition to psychology, were politics and philosophy. Eventually, both began to merge for me back into psychology: helping people change their lives politically and socially required understanding them psychologically, and Nietzsche convinced me that philosophy had made a wrong turn in focusing on how people should be rather than on how people actually are.
I got my doctorate in clinical psychology at New York University (NYU) in the remarkably open and stimulating atmosphere created by Bernie Kalinkowitz and many of his friends, adjunct faculty trained at the William Alanson White Psychiatric Institute. I minored in community psychology. My dual focus on individuals and social processes was maintained in my internship at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, where I spent half the year on the community service and half the year on the psychoanalytic service.
My conceptual and clinical development in those years reflected that same dialectical tension between the individual and the social, intrapsychic, and interpersonal. Although Freudian ego psychology was very much a presence at NYU (through Robert Holt, Leo Goldberger, and others), I was most drawn to interpersonal teachers and supervisors whose ideas spoke more directly to my own experience and understanding of the world. I read Sullivan and Fromm avidly, and I was introduced (through Bernie Friedland) to Fairbairn and Guntrip. At about the same time, I discovered the existentialist and interpersonal essays of Leslie Farber, whose thought has had a lasting influence on me. During those years, I was also in a very meaningful and useful personal analysis with a contemporary Freudian.
For me, these various foci deepened during the mid-1970s at the White institute. I was forced to change to a White institute training analyst, which I resented at first. However, the second analysis in some respects had more of an impact on me than the first did, and I have come to treasure the two experiences in tandem as having taught me a great deal about how deeply personal and interpersonal each analytic dyad is. The dominant intellectual influence at White in those years was Edgar Levenson, who greatly transformed and modernized interpersonal theory into its current emphasis on transference-countertransference phenomena. But I was also very lucky to be able to study Freud with Irving Paul and ego psychology with Martin Bergman. My favorite supervisor, Geneva Goodrich, told me that it takes about seven to eight years to learn to do psychoanalysis, so that took off some of the pressure I put on myself. I had enormously rich clinical experiences with patients and supervisors, and I still find myself thinking about these experiences and people today. I watched my clinical work change from year to year in tandem with changes in supervisors, and I worried about being too easily influenced, as if I were clinically promiscuous. (This was also noted by a couple of my patients!) But I decided again thatpsychoanalysis was a very personal business and that a kind of surrender to the sensibility of supervisors and teachers was the best way to learn deeply what they had to offer. I stopped worrying.
I had discovered in college that the only way to really learn anything was to study it on one's own, and I began to find that the best way to learn something deeply was to teach it. I taughtpsychoanalytic ideas and interdisciplinary courses to undergraduates for eight years during the 1970s, and then I began teaching at a wide range of different psychoanalytic institutes. It was in teaching-taking apart, reconstructing, and comparing different theoretical models-that I discovered that I had developed a point of view. And it was in presenting and reflecting on my own clinical work that I discovered that I had indeed developed a coherent style of my own. The teaching lent itself naturally to writing, which I had always loved doing, but until then I had not felt that I had anything particularly useful to say. To the deep satisfactions of doing clinical work were added a passion for both teaching and writing, on which I have continued to spend a major portion of time, to this very moment. For the past 15 years or so, I have been meeting with reading groups to explore both past and present analytic literature. Meeting with these groups has been a rich vehicle for sharing and processing my clinical experiences and ideas. It is difficultfor me to imagine doing clinical work without the teaching and writing that have become its counterpart.
Over lunch one day, Jay Greenberg and I discovered that we were both planning to write the same book. We joined forces, and the book eventually became Object Relations in PsychoanalyticTheory (1983). We wanted to show that a broad shift (in those days, paradigm was not yet a cliched word) had taken place over several preceding decades of psychoanalytic thought-from anunderstanding of mind as built from drive-based impulses and defenses to an understanding of mind as built from relational configurations. We tried to demonstrate the different strategies for dealing with this shift-from more conservative strategies of accommodation (in Freudian ego psychology) to more radical strategies of clear alternatives (in interpersonal theory and in the object relations theory of Fairbairn). For me, writing this book was extraordinary in many ways. Jay and I often converged in our approaches to issues, but there were some important differences as well. Struggling with those differences and devising a conceptual framework for encompassing them made the book much more balanced and textured than it would have been if either of us had written it alone. That taught me a great deal about collaboration and community. And research into the book sections for which I was responsible deepened my sense that there were fundamental compatibilities among interpersonal psychoanalysis, British school object relations theories (particularly Fairbairn's), and much of the clinical wisdom of contemporary Kleinian theory.
The understanding of the history of psychoanalytic ideas that developed in those years has stayed with me ever since. There had been many innovations and departures from classical Freudian drive theory over the years, but they had remained isolated around different issues in different schools-interpersonal theory, object relations theory, self psychology, existential psychoanalysis,humanistic psychology, and so on. Many of these contributions use different terminology, but they are grounded in common conceptual assumptions. Together, they form a comprehensive alternative to what had increasingly become, for me, the anachronistic features of classical metapsychology.
In the mid-1980s, I began to develop an integrated relational perspective for exploring various major psychoanalytic concerns, including sexuality, development, narcissism, agency, aggression, self, authenticity, the psychoanalytic relationship, and analytic process. The results of my explorations were eventually published in Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (1988), Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993), and Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis(1997).
As I was working out my own personal synthesis of concepts and influences, several institutional developments were having an enormous impact on me.
First, the Division of Psychoanalysis (Division 39) of the American Psychological Association began to really take off. After decades of passively waiting and hoping to be taken in by the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Federation, psychologists began to empower themselves to study, teach, and practice psychoanalysis. I became active in teaching at various "local chapters" in different cities (Denver, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and, later, Toronto and Seattle), and these chapters grew into a new generation of psychoanalytic institutes. These teaching experiences-involving marathon weekends, speaker phones, and video cameras-were some of the most exciting I've enjoyed. There seemed to be a synergy between the revolution that was relaxing the tight institutional control that had been strangling psychoanalytic education and the theory and clinical practice revolution that the relational literature was beginning to capture and systematize.
Second, I extended my teaching from the White institute to the Post-doctoral Program at NYU. I was brought in by Bernie Friedland and Mannie Ghent to teach object relations theory in the Interpersonal/Humanistic track at a time when the Freudian and Interpersonal/Humanistic tracks were locked in a power struggle that prevented either from developing fully. In 1989, various factors converged to end this struggle, and Mannie, Bernie, and I (soon to be joined by Phil Bromberg and Jim Fosshage) were given the mandate to form a quasi-independent Relational track. Out of the explosion of interest, which was truly unexpected and startling, emerged a community that has been an extremely rich intellectual home for me.
Third, during the fall of 1989, Lew Aron and I discovered (over another fateful lunch) that we both had the fantasy of developing a relational journal. Lew mentioned this to Paul Stepansky of The Analytic Press. Paul, very excited about the idea, approached me to form a small group to develop the journal that would eventually become Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives. The extraordinary interest the journal attracted almost from the beginning was extremely exciting, and being its editor gave me the opportunity to work closely with colleagues who have become friends and, each in their own way, major influences on my own thinking over the years-at first, Lew Aron, Phil Bromberg, Mannie Ghent, and Adrienne Harris, and then, over the years, Neil Altman, Tony Bass, Jody Davies, and Muriel Dimen. Most recently, we were joined by Margaret Black, Carolyn Clement, and Jay Frankel. In 199x, The Analytic Press launched the Relational Perspectives Book Series, cocdited by Lew Aron and me. Lew and I recently coedited the series volume Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (1999).
The overlapping communities that emerged in these organizations have been extremely important in the development of my understanding and clinical sensibility. In a very fundamental way, my psychoanalytic journey has been a "journey with others," and as a result I have learned a great deal about many things, including these few: the dense complexities of the interactions between analysand and analyst (Lewis Aron, Jay Grecnberg); multiplicitous self states and trauma (Jody Davics, Phil Bromberg); the pervasive and subtle workings of gender (Adrienne Harris, Muriel Dimen, Virginia Goldner); the ways in which we are saturated in social class and racial meanings (Neil Altman); the richness of the self-psychological approach to experience (Margaret Black, Jim Fosshage); and varieties of authenticity and intersubjcctivity in the subtle distinctions among surrender, submission, and recognition (Mannie Ghent, Jessica Benjamin).
As I look back from my current vantage point, I see that the basic interests and values with which I began have stayed with me throughout the years. My early interest in both individual psychology and social problems and processes has led to a relational psychoanalytic vision that emphasizes the interpenetrability of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. Jay Greenberg and I intended the term relational as a bridge concept between interpersonal relations and internal object relations. My subsequent clinical and intellectual experiences have taken me more deeply into both realms. My early education also imparted to me a strong sense of the contextual nature of all human thought-its embeddedness in cultural place and historical time. That commitment has certainly stayed with me over the years and nurtured my involvement in the sometimes hazardous business of "comparative psychoanalysis." It has also girded my conviction that, whereas Freud's psychoanalysis was inevitably both facilitated and constrained by the intellectual milieu of his time, our psychoanalysis must interface with, learn from, and speak to other participants in our intellectual milieu. So, contemporary philosophy, science, philosophy of history, and literary theory have remained to some extent my hobbies. What I have been able to learn about the concerns of scholars in these areas has had an ongoing, living relationship with the evolution of my psychoanalytic ideas and clinical concerns.
2. My Psychoanalytic Journey, by Stephen A. Mitchell, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 24, 2004 (accessible via questia)
2. My Psychoanalytic Journey
by Stephen A. Mitchell
LIKE MANY IN THE FIEED OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, I WAS FIRST DRAWN to the ideas of Freud himself. I don't remember how I came across Freud's writings, but I spent a good part of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school devouring the five-volume edition of Freud's collected papers. I went to college looking for Freud in psychology courses, only to discover rats (not the Rat Man). I ended up with a wonderful cross-disciplinary major, "History, the Arts & Letters," in which I learned a great deal about structural, comparative approaches to ideas. My major interests, in addition to psychology, were politics and philosophy. Eventually, both began to merge for me back into psychology: helping people change their lives politically and socially required understanding them psychologically, and Nietzsche convinced me that philosophy had made a wrong turn in focusing on how people should be rather than on how people actually are.
I got my doctorate in clinical psychology at New York University (NYU) in the remarkably open and stimulating atmosphere created by Bernie Kalinkowitz and many of his friends, adjunct faculty trained at the William Alanson White Psychiatric Institute. I minored in community psychology. My dual focus on individuals and social processes was maintained in my internship at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, where I spent half the year on the community service and half the year on the psychoanalytic service.
My conceptual and clinical development in those years reflected that same dialectical tension between the individual and the social, intrapsychic, and interpersonal. Although Freudian ego psychology was very much a presence at NYU (through Robert Holt, Leo Goldberger, and others), I was most drawn to interpersonal teachers and supervisors whose ideas spoke more directly to my own experience and understanding of the world. I read Sullivan and Fromm avidly, and I was introduced (through Bernie Friedland) to Fairbairn and Guntrip. At about the same time, I discovered the existentialist and interpersonal essays of Leslie Farber, whose thought has had a lasting influence on me. During those years, I was also in a very meaningful and useful personal analysis with a contemporary Freudian.
For me, these various foci deepened during the mid-1970s at the White institute. I was forced to change to a White institute training analyst, which I resented at first. However, the second analysis in some respects had more of an impact on me than the first did, and I have come to treasure the two experiences in tandem as having taught me a great deal about how deeply personal and interpersonal each analytic dyad is. The dominant intellectual influence at White in those years was Edgar Levenson, who greatly transformed and modernized interpersonal theory into its current emphasis on transference-countertransference phenomena. But I was also very lucky to be able to study Freud with Irving Paul and ego psychology with Martin Bergman. My favorite supervisor, Geneva Goodrich, told me that it takes about seven to eight years to learn to do psychoanalysis, so that took off some of the pressure I put on myself. I had enormously rich clinical experiences with patients and supervisors, and I still find myself thinking about these experiences and people today. I watched my clinical work change from year to year in tandem with changes in supervisors, and I worried about being too easily influenced, as if I were clinically promiscuous. (This was also noted by a couple of my patients!) But I decided again thatpsychoanalysis was a very personal business and that a kind of surrender to the sensibility of supervisors and teachers was the best way to learn deeply what they had to offer. I stopped worrying.
I had discovered in college that the only way to really learn anything was to study it on one's own, and I began to find that the best way to learn something deeply was to teach it. I taughtpsychoanalytic ideas and interdisciplinary courses to undergraduates for eight years during the 1970s, and then I began teaching at a wide range of different psychoanalytic institutes. It was in teaching-taking apart, reconstructing, and comparing different theoretical models-that I discovered that I had developed a point of view. And it was in presenting and reflecting on my own clinical work that I discovered that I had indeed developed a coherent style of my own. The teaching lent itself naturally to writing, which I had always loved doing, but until then I had not felt that I had anything particularly useful to say. To the deep satisfactions of doing clinical work were added a passion for both teaching and writing, on which I have continued to spend a major portion of time, to this very moment. For the past 15 years or so, I have been meeting with reading groups to explore both past and present analytic literature. Meeting with these groups has been a rich vehicle for sharing and processing my clinical experiences and ideas. It is difficultfor me to imagine doing clinical work without the teaching and writing that have become its counterpart.
Over lunch one day, Jay Greenberg and I discovered that we were both planning to write the same book. We joined forces, and the book eventually became Object Relations in PsychoanalyticTheory (1983). We wanted to show that a broad shift (in those days, paradigm was not yet a cliched word) had taken place over several preceding decades of psychoanalytic thought-from anunderstanding of mind as built from drive-based impulses and defenses to an understanding of mind as built from relational configurations. We tried to demonstrate the different strategies for dealing with this shift-from more conservative strategies of accommodation (in Freudian ego psychology) to more radical strategies of clear alternatives (in interpersonal theory and in the object relations theory of Fairbairn). For me, writing this book was extraordinary in many ways. Jay and I often converged in our approaches to issues, but there were some important differences as well. Struggling with those differences and devising a conceptual framework for encompassing them made the book much more balanced and textured than it would have been if either of us had written it alone. That taught me a great deal about collaboration and community. And research into the book sections for which I was responsible deepened my sense that there were fundamental compatibilities among interpersonal psychoanalysis, British school object relations theories (particularly Fairbairn's), and much of the clinical wisdom of contemporary Kleinian theory.
The understanding of the history of psychoanalytic ideas that developed in those years has stayed with me ever since. There had been many innovations and departures from classical Freudian drive theory over the years, but they had remained isolated around different issues in different schools-interpersonal theory, object relations theory, self psychology, existential psychoanalysis,humanistic psychology, and so on. Many of these contributions use different terminology, but they are grounded in common conceptual assumptions. Together, they form a comprehensive alternative to what had increasingly become, for me, the anachronistic features of classical metapsychology.
In the mid-1980s, I began to develop an integrated relational perspective for exploring various major psychoanalytic concerns, including sexuality, development, narcissism, agency, aggression, self, authenticity, the psychoanalytic relationship, and analytic process. The results of my explorations were eventually published in Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (1988), Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993), and Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis(1997).
As I was working out my own personal synthesis of concepts and influences, several institutional developments were having an enormous impact on me.
First, the Division of Psychoanalysis (Division 39) of the American Psychological Association began to really take off. After decades of passively waiting and hoping to be taken in by the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Federation, psychologists began to empower themselves to study, teach, and practice psychoanalysis. I became active in teaching at various "local chapters" in different cities (Denver, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and, later, Toronto and Seattle), and these chapters grew into a new generation of psychoanalytic institutes. These teaching experiences-involving marathon weekends, speaker phones, and video cameras-were some of the most exciting I've enjoyed. There seemed to be a synergy between the revolution that was relaxing the tight institutional control that had been strangling psychoanalytic education and the theory and clinical practice revolution that the relational literature was beginning to capture and systematize.
Second, I extended my teaching from the White institute to the Post-doctoral Program at NYU. I was brought in by Bernie Friedland and Mannie Ghent to teach object relations theory in the Interpersonal/Humanistic track at a time when the Freudian and Interpersonal/Humanistic tracks were locked in a power struggle that prevented either from developing fully. In 1989, various factors converged to end this struggle, and Mannie, Bernie, and I (soon to be joined by Phil Bromberg and Jim Fosshage) were given the mandate to form a quasi-independent Relational track. Out of the explosion of interest, which was truly unexpected and startling, emerged a community that has been an extremely rich intellectual home for me.
Third, during the fall of 1989, Lew Aron and I discovered (over another fateful lunch) that we both had the fantasy of developing a relational journal. Lew mentioned this to Paul Stepansky of The Analytic Press. Paul, very excited about the idea, approached me to form a small group to develop the journal that would eventually become Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives. The extraordinary interest the journal attracted almost from the beginning was extremely exciting, and being its editor gave me the opportunity to work closely with colleagues who have become friends and, each in their own way, major influences on my own thinking over the years-at first, Lew Aron, Phil Bromberg, Mannie Ghent, and Adrienne Harris, and then, over the years, Neil Altman, Tony Bass, Jody Davies, and Muriel Dimen. Most recently, we were joined by Margaret Black, Carolyn Clement, and Jay Frankel. In 199x, The Analytic Press launched the Relational Perspectives Book Series, cocdited by Lew Aron and me. Lew and I recently coedited the series volume Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (1999).
The overlapping communities that emerged in these organizations have been extremely important in the development of my understanding and clinical sensibility. In a very fundamental way, my psychoanalytic journey has been a "journey with others," and as a result I have learned a great deal about many things, including these few: the dense complexities of the interactions between analysand and analyst (Lewis Aron, Jay Grecnberg); multiplicitous self states and trauma (Jody Davics, Phil Bromberg); the pervasive and subtle workings of gender (Adrienne Harris, Muriel Dimen, Virginia Goldner); the ways in which we are saturated in social class and racial meanings (Neil Altman); the richness of the self-psychological approach to experience (Margaret Black, Jim Fosshage); and varieties of authenticity and intersubjcctivity in the subtle distinctions among surrender, submission, and recognition (Mannie Ghent, Jessica Benjamin).
As I look back from my current vantage point, I see that the basic interests and values with which I began have stayed with me throughout the years. My early interest in both individual psychology and social problems and processes has led to a relational psychoanalytic vision that emphasizes the interpenetrability of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. Jay Greenberg and I intended the term relational as a bridge concept between interpersonal relations and internal object relations. My subsequent clinical and intellectual experiences have taken me more deeply into both realms. My early education also imparted to me a strong sense of the contextual nature of all human thought-its embeddedness in cultural place and historical time. That commitment has certainly stayed with me over the years and nurtured my involvement in the sometimes hazardous business of "comparative psychoanalysis." It has also girded my conviction that, whereas Freud's psychoanalysis was inevitably both facilitated and constrained by the intellectual milieu of his time, our psychoanalysis must interface with, learn from, and speak to other participants in our intellectual milieu. So, contemporary philosophy, science, philosophy of history, and literary theory have remained to some extent my hobbies. What I have been able to learn about the concerns of scholars in these areas has had an ongoing, living relationship with the evolution of my psychoanalytic ideas and clinical concerns.