Stephen Mitchell Relational Quotes

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).

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.

The mother becomes important because she provides gratification, he believed; human love is built on both direct and disguised (aim-inhibited) gratifications, as the ego finds ways to repress, sublimate, and refine instinctual impulses so they find a place in more complex object relations.

Contemporary interpersonal analysts tend to position the analyst differently. The patient’s interpersonal gambits are regarded as powerful inducements to join the patient in his relational patterns. The analyst is regarded as having interpersonal needs, anxieties, and security operations that are inevitably evoked in interactions with the patient. Because the present is given relatively more weight than the past, the analyst is seen less as a semidetached observer of the patient’s operations and more as a full participant in interpersonal patterns they create and maintain together.

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.

It is the world of internalized and external object relations that keeps sexuality alive and provides the potential for `eternal' sexual gratification

Stephen Mitchell remarks that one of the bitter paradoxes of love is that our desperate efforts to render it secure destroy the very passion on which it is premised; when we seek to minimize the risks of love and guarantee the safety of our relationship, we by definition under- mine “the preconditions of desire, which requires robust imagination to breathe and thrive.” What is more, we tend to try to reduce the treat of love by aspiring to possess the beloved other even when we know full well that the possibility of losing the other is an inherent component of eros. In the previous chapter, I analyzed the manner in which fantasies limit our existential options by making our lives seem more coherent and predictable than they actually are. Along similar lines, Mitchell suggests that our fantasies of having “ownership” over the other—as well as the related idea that we can take steps to protect the future of the relationship against the tug of the unanticipated—in the long run slay passion, for it is only insofar as the other is not possessed, that the other retains an independent identity and existential space, that it remains of interest to us. Our endeavor to secure what is, by its very nature, insecure therefore suffocates the very thing that we are attempting to preserve.

There are hence more or less productive, more or less imaginatively inspired, ways to idealize. An idealizing elaboration of qualities that the other to some degree possesses—and enjoys possessing—is less damaging than worshipping (and insisting on) qualities that do not in any way correspond to how the other views itself. And even with idealizations that reflect the other’s self-image, it is vital to allow ample room for disappointment. An expectation of consistency—an expectation that the other will always meet our ideal—is disastrous in robbing the other of the capacity to be less than perfect. It is, in other words, important to recognize the transient nature of all idealizations. Even though the other’s adored features may not be wholly illusory—even though they may connect to something deeply meaningful in the other’s being—the expectation that they are entirely dependable inevitably is. In the same way that we need to be able to tolerate multiple and conflicting readings of ourselves, we need to come to terms with the manifold and ever-evolving realities of the other. The worst we can do is to fix the other into a static ideal, or to measure it against an inflexible external standard. As Stephen Mitchell explains, whether fantasies “are enriching or depleting depends on the way they are positioned in relation to actuality. Do they encourage an episodic selectivity and elaboration of the beauty of the partner? Or do they foster the illusion that there are other potential partners in the world who are only beautiful and never disappointing?