Mitchell Beyond Freud
Drive and desire served as some of the initial building blocks of psychoanalysis. The major take away, from those who immediately began expanding into their own version of the psychoanalytic theory and building out the early literature base, was that Freud had identified the sexual and aggressive impulses driving human motivation, needs, and wishes. The primary influences on what we ultimately chose to do were processes lying just outside of awareness that were rooted in biological mechanisms of survival, pleasure, and reproduction. However, it seems notable in reading Freud’s work—and that of many of his contemporaries—that people of the era were often analyzed to be suffering from too much desire. The basic principles of Freud’s theory, and case conceptualization after case conceptualization, reveal patients whose primitive impulses are so intensely experienced and conspired against, that without any obvious means of expression, the psyche and soma reconstitute those impulses into a set of symptoms that carry just enough of the initial meaning to satisfy the need, but ultimately leaves the patient having to navigate some nagging form of general dysfunction.
Now it is possible that there is a little bit of a hammer and nail phenomenon happening here. I can only imagine what it would have been like to be living on the cusp of such a revolutionary reframing of the psychological underpinnings of human behavior. For Freud’s many acolytes and devotees, it must have been impossible not to feel as though some veil had been lifted. In exposing something about human behavior that had been previously covered up, every expression of human behavior was suddenly in need of being rendered in these exciting new terms. No sneeze, hiccup, or gurgling stomach could be assumed to be coincidental. Events as massive and far reaching as the crashing of economies, political upheavals, and the construction culture, all the way down to the way someone chooses to shake hands, could now all plausibly be understood in the context of interrupted sexual longings and aggressive impulses.
In Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell makes the argument that something shifted in the intervening years between the emergence of psychoanalysis as a discipline and the manner in which it was being practiced some 100 years later in the early 90’s when he was writing the book (and subsequently shaped a lot of the way people have thought and written about psychoanalysis in the years since Mitchell made his mark on the field). Mitchell is an interesting figure in the history of psychoanalysis. He is largely attributed with being the driving force for the promulgation of the relational turn in psychoanalysis. Though this is largely true, I think it is important to remember that Mitchell was much more of a synthesizer than he was someone who was responsible for developing new and penetrating insights into the human psyche. I find myself disappointed with his work in moments where either I am hoping for more or he does seem to be trying to coin something that simply isn’t as electric as maybe he had hoped it to be. But he is without a doubt one of the best communicators of complex psychoanalytic theories and concepts; was able to bring together some strands that elucidated new and useful ways of using some of the tools that already existed; and (and I mean this sincerely) seemed to have a real nose for branding, marketing, and motivating/inspiring people in a way that allowed the relational movement to flourish and which has been to the benefit of any of us who’ve moved by the eclectic and essential writings that have been carried forward by or born out of that tradition.
Like everything else of significance Mitchell wrote, Hope and Dread is impressive in terms of its ability to wrestle with the full scope of psychoanalytic history, as well as the ways in which it builds its arguments about the important conceptual shifts that occurred, how those shifts came to be, and why they matter. Mitchell’s primary argument is that psychoanalysis moved away from the kind of biological concerns outlined above and has become more interested with the structures of meaning, symbolization, and sense of importance patients attribute to the quality of their lives more broadly. Again, this is not something he is reconstituting, but rather something he is observing in the writings of thinkers starting with Winnicott and Bion, through to some of his peers, such as Ogden, Benjamin, and Bollas. What is important is not the uncovering of unconscious processes that inform neurotic underpinnings of pathology, but rather that something about the way contemporary society is structured has disconnected individuals from a deeper and richer sense of the experience of living.
Mitchell notes how those writing in the 60’s and 70’s in the Anglo-American world were seeing something in their patients that felt different from the kind of renunciation of impulses that Freud had advocated. Winnicott and Fromm are invoked to show the ways in which cultural forces were coming to be understood as overwhelming individuals’ right to expression, with Fromm especially critical of ways in which capitalist forces and marketing were fundamentally reshaping cultural norms and values. People were still repressed, but rather than being repressed by Victorian era ethics and developing distinct behavioral tics or somatic phenomena, repression was being funneled through repressed needs and desires that could find their expression in capitalist endeavors and expression of self and or status through material goods.
I admittedly go back and forth on whether this is quite as clean of a separation as Mitchell seems to suggest, but there is something compelling about it. However, I wonder if a large part of what he misses here is not just the massive cultural shift that psychoanalysis had to adapt to, but the ways in which those shifts also spurred the advent of new forms of psychotherapy that psychoanalysts of different eras explored and adapted to as well. It’s notable that up to a certain point in the history of this discipline, nearly everyone who practiced therapy received training as an analyst. The Existential and Gestalt tradition in particular were two off shoots that didn’t necessarily abandon psychoanalytic principles altogether, but tried to reimagine them through a new conceptual framework.
It’s often easy to think of these disciplines as being quite siloed, they are taught that way to graduates and undergraduates as a part of pedagogical practice in order to simplify their concepts and demonstrate the ways each is distinct and essential in the historical development of the various psychotherapies. In reality, the folks who operate and think about these things at the highest level (and who aren’t necessarily hell bent on branding some fancy new acronym to market and profit off of) are far more multidisciplinary and eclectic in their thought. Benjamin seemingly can’t be written about by others without acknowledging the feminist and critical theory influences she brought to her thinking; Ogden recently has been trying to make sense of something he is calling ontological psychoanalysis, drawing on Hegel and other philosophers to demonstrate the ways psychoanalysis can be a theory of being; Bollas, Bromberg, and Edgar Levenson (who I wrote about recently) draw deeply from various literary influences; and Ghent merged ideas from his own Buddhist practice and an abiding interest in the developing technologies of his time. Psychoanalysis is one of the most intellectually rigorous and challenging bodies of theory that one can take up. It would make sense that the folks who endeavor to do so are broadly curious and intellectually stimulated by a range of disciplines that get metabolized and absorbed into the intellectual framework of analysis as a whole. The shifts in theory are not just about cultural histories, but about the personal histories on the individual level and the available intellectual histories being drawn on, and a myriad of other histories that make up the fact that being is always constituted by a time that is complexly historical.
I get the sense that the most important development for psychoanalysis over the last several decades has been the ability to get more and more distance from the cult of personality that was Sigmund Freud. The practice of psychotherapy is broadly and immensely indebted to him. I more often fall on the side of the fact that it is an abomination more people in this field haven’t at least spent a little time actually reading some of his more complex work and just trust the instruction they got from some doctoral student who told them in an introduction to psychology course that Freud begins and ends with the psychosexual model and that psychoanalysis can be discarded because it is unfalsifiable. The parallel I often draw is to say that it’s a little like studying physics and not knowing anything about Newton except that at some point an apple allegedly fell on his head.
Freud is such a complicated figure to wrap one’s head around. On the one hand, he was notoriously stringent about demanding obedience and fealty from those who practiced analysis, seeing any wandering astray of the principles he had identified as a fundamental betrayal. On the other, he wrote voluminously for decades, leaving a body of work that was constantly evolving, challenging, and outright contradicting itself, seemingly aware that there was so much this new discipline had yet to discover. However, it seems obvious that the thing that was most needed was the ability to get a couple of generations removed from Freud in order for psychoanalysis to begin to take on a new and more interesting shape and texture. No longer constrained by the shadow of his influence, theorists seem more freely able to make sense of this vast and demanding body of work.
Thinking about this another way: it seems notable to me that when we talk about Freud, we are always only ever talking about Freud. A couple generations hence, even those struggling to be most revolutionary with what he wrote (with the exception of maybe Fairbairn) all insisted they were being strictly Freudian in their interpretation of psychoanalytic practice. There’s a sense that if one couldn’t prove that their work related to Freud some how, then they weren’t doing psychoanalysis, with folks like Adler and Jung having been relegated to their own spaces for their having wandered to far from the center. Mitchell, by comparison, freely references many of his peers, Freud, and a variety of practitioners through the history of analysis. We meaningfully talk about the valuable ways in which the field should be understood as having moved away from Freud’s Victorian era, overly scientistic, and paternal theorizing. Rather than being the loadstone on which theorizing is based, we are now free to theorize about his theorizing, and demonstrate the ways it laid the foundation for something far more complex than he could have imagined, even if he wouldn’t necessarily likely agree with it’s current shape.
Again, I feel I should pledge my intellectual loyalty and insist that this is not to say we should get away from Freudian interpretation altogether. One of my first experiences of Mitchell is with the object relations book he wrote following the famous one he wrote with Jay Greenberg. In that text he takes a single case study and interprets it fairly effectively through a Freudian, Kleinian, British object relations, and self psychology lens (and probably a couple others that I’m forgetting—including the interpersonal school, which was Mitchell’s primary training). Having a basis in each of these traditions allows us something different in the work we do with the complex personalities that find their way into our conulting room. Some of our client’s might actually benefit from our being able to sit with them and understand something of the possibility of their particular set of problems having a basis in the repression of sexual and aggressive drives, in addition to some of what Mitchell argues about the “contemporary analytic patient”. The more richly we can understand their experience, the more we can use those instruments to develop a richer sense of their own experience, which is what the work is ultimately about anyway.
