Stephen A. Mitchell > Quotes

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Sullivan became increasingly convinced, the individual is simply not the unit to study. Human beings are inseparable, always and inevitably, from their interpersonal field. The individual’s personality takes shape in an environment composed of other people. The individual is in continual interaction with other people. The personality or self is not something that resides “inside” the individual, but rather something that appears in interactions with others. “Personality . . . is made manifest in interpersonal situations and not otherwise” (1938, p. 32), Sullivan suggested. Personality is “the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life” (1940, p. xi).”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“people often act in a way that provokes precisely the reactions they are expecting. These”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Sullivan came to feel that human activity and human mind are not things that reside in the individual, but rather are generated in interactions among individuals; personalities are shaped to fit interpersonal niches and are not understandable unless that complex, interactive honing process is taken into account.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Love, by its very nature, is not secure; we keep wanting to make it so.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“Freud found that the most central childhood problems regularly surface not in discussion but in disguised form in the analytic relationship. It”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“If she let herself feel warmly for someone, she feared she would disappear into the other, and enter a marginal, formless world, part human, part inanimate. Here hands, symbolic for her of human connectedness, reached out to her to lure her into a nonhuman nightmare.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“In Fromm’s view, the unconscious is a social creation, maintained because of the deep abhorrence each of us has of our own freedom and the social isolation we fear may result from a fuller expression of our authentic, personal experience.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Freud viewed the transference as the centerpiece of the analytic process, providing access to the patient’s hidden and forbidden wishes as she expressed and tried to gratify them with the analyst. The”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Sullivan described the analyst’s way of engaging the patient as “participant observation.” The patient attempts to draw the analyst into his characteristic forms of interaction. The analyst, like a sensitive instrument, uses her awareness of these subtle interpersonal pulls and pushes to develop hypotheses about the patient’s security operations. But Sullivan did not regard it as helpful for the analyst to get deeply personally involved with the patient. The analyst was an expert at interpersonal relations, and her expert status would keep her from getting drawn into pathological integrations. She needs to be aware enough of minor eruptions of anxiety within herself to avoid engaging in security operations of her own. The competent analyst would not need anything interpersonally from the patient and therefore would have no strong or turbulent feelings for the patient.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Libido, in Freud’s account, begins as inwardly (narcissistically) directed, and is only secondarily directed toward objects. Freud used this pattern as a template for understanding the aggressive drive as well. Thus he suggested that aggression also begins as inwardly directed, derived from a death instinct. The baby begins life with both self-directed love and self-directed destructiveness. This revised Freudian infant, now infused with both sexual and aggressive energies, is often in a state of heightened tension, within which she may be indiscriminately aroused, stimulated by both libidinal and aggressive feelings, pleasure and pain. From”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“The stranger’s presence alerts him to his mother’s absence. For Spitz, this behavioral reaction signaled the attainment of psychological capacities that make a singular, personal attachment possible. “There is no love until the loved one can be distinguished from all others” (1965,”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Sullivan distinguished between fear and anxiety. If a loud noise occurs, if hunger is unaddressed, if tensions of any sort increase, the baby becomes afraid. Fear actually operates as an integrating tendency; as it is expressed in crying and agitation, it draws the caregiver into an interaction that will soothe the baby and address the problem. Anxiety, in contrast, has no focus and does not arise from increasing tension in the baby herself. Anxiety is picked up from other people.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Many patients grew up feeling their perceptions of their parents were forbidden and dangerous. They have learned to discount their own often discerning observations and consequently feel mystified about what happens between themselves and others. The”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“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.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“Symbolic representation makes it possible for instinctual impulses to find disguised, socially acceptable forms of gratification, not as satisfying as direct physical pleasure, but a reasonable compromise with necessary social constraints. Thus”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“As with good history, good psychoanalytic interpretations must also make sense, pull together as much of the known data as possible, provide a coherent and persuasive account, and also facilitate personal growth. Psychoanalytic”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“He envisioned the products of successful analysis as individuals constructively free of repression, able to use their manifold component sexual instincts for their own pleasure and satisfaction.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Interpretations, like the sculptor’s chisel, would be used to target and then chip away at the imprisoning defenses, exposing the patient’s inner psychic reality. This inner psychic reality, essentially driven by pleasure-seeking fantasy, pulled the patient away from facing what Freud had referred to as “the brick wall of reality” that would challenge unacceptable fantasies and free the entangled energy for more realistic projects.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Natanijel Brendan nas upoznaje s pričom o dr. Odri Ričards, antropologu koja je tridesetih godina XX veka radila s plemenom Bemba iz Severne Rodezije. Dr. Ričards je, kaže on, grupi pripadnika tog plemena jednom ispričala englesku narodnu bajku o mladom princu koji se peo uz planine pokrivene ledom, prelazio provalije i borio se sa zmajevima da bi osvojio devojku koju je voleo. Slušaoci su očigledno bili zbunjeni, ali nisu ništa rekli. Najzad se oglasio jedan stari poglavica rečima koje su izražavale osećanja svih prisutnih. ,,Zašto nije uzeo drugu devojku?", jednostavno je upitao.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“Ljubav se stalno menja zato što se mi stalno menjamo. Stoga romantična ljubav, sama po sebi, donosi nestabilnost. Čini nas nezadovoljnim onim što imamo time što nas uvek usmerava ka nečemu što ne posedujemo u potpunosti, ili posedujemo u nedovoljnoj meri, ili pak u čije smo posedovanje suviše sigurni.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“One may take on some qualities of a loved one following her death; the five-year-old identifies with his father’s moral code in response to the oedipal frustration of being denied mother as a sexual partner. As long as gratification is available via objects in the real world, identification is irrelevant. When gratification is interrupted, when the object is lost or becomes unavailable because of conflict, the object is internalized to permit fantasy gratification. Identification”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“The development of subjectivity is inextricably bound up with the appreciation of the subjectivity of others”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis

“Martin Bergmann (1973) has explored the episodic return to symbiotic fusion that characterizes some of the deepest aspects of mature romantic love.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“In Lacan’s view, it is not just dreams but conscious subjective experience in general that is organized into distracting little stories, and it is the folly of ego psychology and object relations theories to have bought into the disguises offered by secondary elaboration, to have taken the illusory stories as real, rather than covers for an underlying sense of loss, absence, castration.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“sexual orientation is fundamentally constitutional and not subject to change,”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Exquisitely sensitive to her infant’s nonverbal messages, the “good” mother empathically divines the needs of her baby with near clairvoyant accuracy, relying on her capacity to regressively revive in herself this early communication channel that, Spitz felt, is lost to most adults. She senses why her infant is crying, a mystery to others, and is able to respond correctly. Each accurate reading and satisfying intervention—picking him up, feeding him, jostling him, soothing him—becomes another interaction in the essential cycle of meaning-making. Spitz saw these repetitions as also helping the infant sort out feeling states into discernible, sequential categories with beginnings and endings (for example: I was upset, then I felt better), contributing to the laying down of memory traces of recognizable experience. Thus Spitz offered psychoanalysis a very different kind of developmental progression, adding to the unfolding psychosexual sequence of drive discharge (from oral to anal to phallic to oedipal) the increasing structuralization of ego capacities which emerge, in the first year of life, within crucial transformations in the relationship to the libidinal object.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“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”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“For Kernberg, the central dynamic struggle is between love and hate, and these manifest themselves necessarily in the transference to the analyst.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

“Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought