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.
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.