Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity

Mitchell, Stephen A. Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2000. xix + 173 pp. 39. 95. Sherrington, a neurologist and a contemporary of Freud, noted that the complex brain that enables us to master our world also enslaves us to it as our brains collect and organize masses of information outside our awareness; this dense mass of information determines our actions and shapes our attitudes. Freud, also a neurologist, pioneered the psychoanalytic study of how the information accumulated in neurotogenic childhood experience unconsciously influences individual adults. Both received Nobel prizes, Sherrington for his study of the organization of the nervous system and Freud received the prize for literature. Freud's literary tradition is continued with Stephen Mitchell's Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. This is a well-organized presentation of "a different way of understanding human beings as fundamentally social, not as drawn into interaction, but as embedded in an interactive matrix with others as his or her natural state" (p. 105). Fairbairn and Sullivan had a vision of humans as fundamentally social that contrasts very sharply with the traditional Freudian vision of solitary people driven to relate by sex and driven to dominate by aggression. The dense mass of accumulated information noted by Sherrington led Hans Loewald to argue that persons are embedded in "early experiences. . . kinesthetic memories of experiences in which self and other are undifferentiated" (p. 22). Mitchell's relational perspective based on Loewald's argument sees the human mind as embedded in a common undifferentiated matrix, out of which individual minds differentiate. Our mental life is most alive when there are open links between our differentiated (individuated) more adult aspects and our undifferentiated origins. Mitchell quotes Stern, who argues that the development of language is double edged in that language furthers differentiation but cuts off the links to the undifferentiated nonverbal past. Mitchell follows Loewald's view that the infant's mental life begins in an infant mother-field. The meaning of "primary process" is reshaped to refer to a primary embeddedness in this unorganized relational field. For Loewald, "secondary process" refers to the organization of the relational field begun by the actions of the caregivers. Thus, the beneficial and detrimental actions of caregivers become cathected differentiating experiences that the infant uses to organize his or her relational field. The infant's sense of relatedness to particular caregivers (objects) emerges as the infant learns to distinguish these objects as part of what began as a global relational field. Mitchell notes that this relational view of development makes clear why the "residues of early object relations" are so resistant to change. According to the relational view, the boundary between self and other is a later development, the product of a secondary process organization. By contrast, early experiences are registered on a primary process level when there is no boundary between the patient and early caregivers. The memories of the original fused relational field are harder to interpret and are more likely to be encoded in implicit process memories. Primary process relational memories coexist with the more differentiated experiences remembered more explicitly. In the relational view, neurotic psychopathology is defined by fettered links between primary and secondary processes, and more severe psychotic psychopathology occurs when chaotic undifferentiated experience overwhelms the more organized (secondary process) approach to the object world. Psychoanalytic therapy ushers in a liveliness that is contingent on unfettering the links between a fixed view of the adult object world and the chaotic undifferentiated matrix common to all of us. The relational view of the psychoanalytic process is "radically interactive. " Mitchell notes that Loewald considered human minds to be embedded in an interactive matrix with other minds, and thus the minds of the analyst and analysand are open to and embedded in each other. Part II of the book presents Mitchell's view of how object relations are organized and the implications for psychoanalytic therapy. He describes a four tiered hierarchy of interaction. The first concerns what people do with each other, the second concerns the intense affect that can envelop people, the third includes organized self-other configurations, and the fourth "is intersubjectivity, the mutual recognition of self reflective, agentic persons" (p. 58). There are chapters that examine the contribution of attachment theory to the relational view and Fairbairn's work is considered in detail. Mitchell illustrates the richness of the relational view in several clinical examples. In the final chapter, Mitchell returns to the theme of inter-subjectivity in a chapter subtitled Between Expressiveness and Restraint that captures his view of the analytic relationship. "Love and hate in the analytic relationship are very real, but also contextual. The asymmetrical structure of the analytic situation is a powerful shaper of the feelings that emerge within it, making certain kinds of feelings possible and excluding others. It is precisely because these feelings, as real as they are so context-dependent that they are not easily translatable into extra- or post-analysis relationships. And neither restraint nor expressiveness, in themselves, are useful as guides to the management of analytic feelings. . . Both can be thoughtful or thoughtless. . . . It is a central feature of the analyst's craft to struggle with these distinctions, to make what seem the best choices at the time. . . " (p. 146). No current psychoanalytic theory, including relational theory, can direct the analyst or analysand; their actions and judgments are most effective when spontaneous and spontaneity has marked psychoanalytic therapy since Freud introduced the basic rule of free association. But relationality truly enhances the power of theory as a more effective tool for reconsidering those spontaneous actions and judgments because it introduces a more effective referential language enabling analysts and analysands to more quickly become aware of the contextual meaning of the unfolding action. This evolution in the power and accuracy of psychoanalytic theory resembles therapeutic change in that a psychoanalyst's narrative of his work becomes a more effective and realistic tool for reviewing therapeutic relationships. We can't predict how the mass of available information gets integrated into spontaneous human action, we don't know enough; but we can enhance the power of our theories to review the actions we can't yet predict. Psychoanalysis is literary to the extent that we are still limited to retrospective understanding and it is also scientific in that the time delay between spontaneous action and reflection is getting smaller and smaller. Stephen Mitchell's recent and sudden tragic death deprived us of a colleague who advanced both the literary tradition of Freud and the scientific understanding Freud shared with Sherrington. Herbert S. Gross, M. D. Rockville, Maryland