Quotes from Stephen A. Mitchell

Freud believed that because the core of psychopathology was the repression of conflictual, infantile impulses, which sought disguised gratification from the analyst in many different forms, it was essential for the analyst not to give the patient any gratification, because gratification allows the impulse to be discharged rather than be remembered, thought about, and renounced. American

Loewald suggests that infantile, oedipal love detracts from and interferes with adult love when childhood experience is repressed, too strictly separated from adult experience. Then

For Jacobson, libido and aggression function as indispensable counterbalances to each other. Libido (evoked in moments of gratification) encourages pulling close, taking in; aggression (evoked in moments of frustration) prompts pushing off, moving out.

From a contemporary interpersonal point of view, there is no emotionally neutral position. The analyst will get caught up in the patient's dynamics no matter how hard he tries not to. The very idea that he might be free of the interactional mix itself is a problem, because it blinds the analyst to his own involvement and requires the patient to collude in that denial. Thus

Winnicott's understanding of the way experience can become traumatizing is quite different from Freud's. Trauma for Winnicott is not just the introduction of something dramatically negative, frightening, and noxious (e.g., precocious sexual stimulation); it is most fundamentally the failure to sustain something positive—the necessary conditions for healthy psychic development. Thus

The child is not traumatized by a sexual event, per se; the child is traumatized by parental character pathology. Because

Reclaimed, unrepressed infantile experience enriches rather than detracts from adult experience. The

Erikson (1950), for example, regarded male genitalia as orienting boys to external space and female genitalia as orienting girls to internal space. Boys

In breaking down the developmental journey through successive states of psychic organization, Mahler enabled clinicians to understand more deeply and treat more effectively children and adults who came to be officially diagnosed as borderline patients, whose severe pathology fell between the classifications of neurosis and psychosis.

Preoedipal pathology manifests not so much in discrete symptoms or guilty, conflictual indecision as in more pervasive disturbances of psychological function: intense, unregulatable feeling states, extreme fluctuation in images of self and/or other, impaired capacity for steady relatedness—disturbances that characterize pathology like masochism and severe depression.

Freud, again using his conclusions about men's moral attitudes and functioning as a baseline, had decided that women lack a strong superego and hence are deficient in moral values. In

In Freud's account, the male superego is established under the threat of castration anxiety, which forces the boy to abandon his oedipal ambitions, but little girls experience themselves as already castrated, and thus have less motivation to keep infantile instinctual impulses in check; consequently they have less energy available for the sublimation that fuels higher-level organization and

Martin Bergmann (1973) has explored the episodic return to symbiotic fusion that characterizes some of the deepest aspects of mature romantic love.

What we describe as a person's "character" is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognized as being unutilizable. (1905

Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.

In Sullivan's interpersonal framework, the patient is viewed as striving to maintain security in her dealings with others. Past relationships have resulted in deep pain and humiliation; security operations have developed to ward off those dangers in present relationships. The scene of the action is in the patient's interactions with others.

Nature and nurture are now generally regarded less as distinct, separable causes and more as interactive, mutually created sets of processes.

Love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage, but it is crucial that the horse of passion quickly be tethered by the weight of the carriage of respectability to prevent runaways.

Love, by its very nature, is not secure; we keep wanting to make it so.

This fear manifested in Harvey's self-protective vigilance with the analyst, his continually orchestrating the analytic experience rather than allowing himself to rely on the analyst.

It is correct (and a great improvement) to begin to think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each giving a monocular view of what goes on and, together, giving a binocular view in depth. This double view is the relationship.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

Her work suggested that the use of denial, as well as that of projection and introjection, signaled, in the adult, disturbances that were rooted in developmentally early phases of childhood.

The renunciation of the child's sexual ambitions and dyadic unity with the mother is established through the father's presence, which stands for the regulating, organizing, symbolizing functions of language itself. Lacan