Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, by Stephen A. Mitchell. Relational Perspectives Book Series, Volume 9. Madison: Analytic Press, 1997. 304 pages.
In Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis the author says he wants us to think-to think more about what we are doing in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Mitchell says that late twentieth-century thought places the individual in a social, linguistic, and ecological context, and that psychoanalytic literature increasingly regards self-experience as comprising multiple and shifting selforganizations and self-states, states that are generated in interpersonal and social fields. Personal autonomy is seen by interpersonal analysts as an emergent property of interactive processes.
In this book Mitchell reworks the traditional ideal of autonomy, and confronts the traditional ideal of autonomy. He sees psychoanalysis as grounding meaning in the rich tapestry of experience that is generated in the dialectic between past and present, the conscious and the unconscious, the fantastic and the real, the given and the constructed. This grounding "entails a deepening of our understanding of the analytic relationship and its lasting residues that acknowledges rather than denies its deeply interactive nature." Mitchell goes on to say that what we need now is a comprehensive framework for thinking about analytic interaction, that encompasses both intrapsychic and interpersonal dimensions. In actual fact, the material with which the analyst works is "always the analyst's construction of the patient's construction of the patienf s point of view."
Mitchell traces the history of psychoanalysis from the focus on the one-person psychology of Freud, where transference is seen as a temporal displacement, to the Kleinian notion of transference that involves a displacement from internal to external. Contemporary views include the idea of projective identification, which has become elaborated, particularly by some American object relations theorists, extending projective identification beyond the merely intrapsychic to include a mode of operation in interpersonal relationships that can be both normal and pathological. The Kleinian approach can lead to a tension between a two-person understanding and a one-person technique. Mitchell says that the one-person model led to the image of the generic analyst who is thought of as an invisible person, and that analysis proceeds with its own momentum. The interpersonal model takes into account the complexity of possible meanings and the context of the interaction. Mitchell explores countertransference from many different angles and has included many innovations of technique.
Mitchell explores the work of a number of authors from the point of view of the impact and influence of the interaction between analyst and analysand. If the analyst is aware of the patient's material and its impact on him or her, the countertransference productions, thoughts, feelings, actions, and somatic states give a clue to dissociated affective states in the analysand. This fact has been known for some years but has been further elaborated on in present-day theorizing, sometimes to the exclusion of the intrapsychic. Mitchell does not exclude the intrapsychic. One has the sense in reading the book that the intrapsychic is always in the back of the author's mind, but for the novice therapist there is a danger that it may become lost in undue focus on the complexities of meaning and understanding in the interaction between analyst and analysand. As Mitchell says, in his own clinical work he keeps in mind Renik's idea of "the irreducible subjectivity of the analyst's participation." This focus does not easily move back and forth between the interaction and its complexities and the intrapsychic level from the perspective of the effects of inner-generated intrapsychic conflicts which involve the wishes, needs, desires and fantasies of the individual, which can lead to anxieties, inhibitions, and symptoms. These issues in turn can be either exaggerated or relieved by the analyst's participation in the current context of the dyadic interaction.
The dyadic approach, as so clearly elucidated by Mitchell in this admirable book, has opened the door for us to progress into the triadic, the three-dimensional world of competitiveness and rivalry in the family, the community, and the transferencecountertransference domain. If we can come to understand this triadic dimension better in the transference-countertransference, then perhaps this will guide us to a better understanding of group dynamics in the social world. These dynamics include those within our psychoanalytic institutions, which currently reflect the tensions and dynamics we fail to understand in our dyadic relationships because of a displacement from the inner world of the analyst to the outer world. The complex incompatibilities between the needs of the intimate relationship and the needs of the larger group-family, community, country, and society-continue to be expressed in the cultural arena. Psychoanalytic theorizing has some catching up to do. As Mitchell says, "At its best psychoanalysis can assuage painful residues of childhood, release thwarted creative potentials, heal fragmentation, and bridge islands of isolation and despair." One can also add that it is necessary to consider the triadic world of competitiveness and rivalry and what it takes psychologically to collaborate in a civilized world.
[Author Affiliation]
Margaret Huntley
1407 Yonge Street, #301
Toronto, ON M4T 1Y7
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