Hope and dread in psychoanalysis

The love affair that psychoanalysis has had with its own founder has obscured just how different the field is today from what it was a century ago when Freud was writing. Now Stephen Mitchell, a central figure in the modernization of psychoanalysis, shows how the field is moving beyond the confines of Freudian drive theory to encompass the concerns of contemporary life. Whereas classical analysis focuses on conflicts over sexual and aggressive impulses residing within the patient, the psychoanalysis Mitchell presents, and beautifully illustrates with vivid case examples, emphasizes the wishes and needs of both analyst and analysand. The tensions and reconciliations between them - their "hopes and dreads"--Become the medium of change. Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis presents a vision of the analytic process that is both distinctly personal and interpersonal, integrating many currents of relational thinking, including object relations theories, self psychology, existential psychoanalysis, and much more. The book synthesizes two broad revolutions in recent psychoanalytic thought: a revolution in theory concerning the question, "What does the patient need?" and a revolution in metatheory concerning the question, "What does the analyst know?" Never before have these questions and their rich interconnections been explored with such depth and thoroughness. The book also illuminates the ways in which the concept of self has become the central theoretical construct for addressing meaning in contemporary psychoanalysis. Here is a probing look at today's revolutions in psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice, by one of the most original and incisive writers on the psychoanalytic scene today.