STEPHEN A. MITCHELL AND MARGARET BLACK. Freud and Beyond. A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought. Basic Books, New York, 1995, 293 pp., $27.50, ISBN 0-231 100221. Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret Black, both well-known psychoanalytic educators, show us in Freud and Beyond how psychoanalytic theory, which started in an age of rationality and objective truth-while also challenging these very valueshas gradually been turning toward a postmodern perspective. The authors choose to introduce each School from the perspective of their foremost spokespersons, leaving all the hotly debated controversies to the last chapters. This approach has the advantage of keeping the integrity of each theory and allowing readers to make up their own minds, and the disadvantage of a somewhat bland neutrality. This is especially striking in the first chapter on Freud's original theory in which the Freudian legend on how it all happened-for example, the much disputed Anna O. story, or why Freud gave up the seduction theory-is rigorously preserved. The reader is then introduced to the Schools of Ego Psychology-with Hartmann, Spitz, Mahler, and Jacobson as leading theorists-emphasizing the gradual transformation of Freud's instinct theories toward a more interpersonal bent. Generally, all along, the concepts of each new School are compared to Freud's original body of theories-to a fault. In chapter 5, we meet the British Objects Relations School represented by Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip, and Balint where the importance of instincts are replaced by the equally fateful nature of the early maternal environment. Mitchell's co-authored 1983 book, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, showed his expertise in that area, and here again, the clarity and succinctness of the exposition of various scholars' theoretical perspectives is outstanding. I do wonder why John Bowlby, whose attachment theory had such a decisive influence on our current thinking about human development, is only discussed in one page, while Melanie Klein is allocated the entire chapter 4. Erik Erikson and Heinz Kohut find themselves in the same chapter 6, both dealing with Identity and/or the Self. Here again, I found myself wishing that the authors had mentioned the recent discovery that the famous patient Mr. Z., who changed the course of his thinking, was Kohut himself. This reviewer was pleased, for her students' sake, to encounter an entire chapter on Harry Stack Sullivan-along with other Neo-Freudians-even though he is usually not viewed as having worked within the psychoanalytic fold. But Mitchell, known as a leading relational theorist himself, introduces Sullivan as the founder of interpersonal psychoanalysis. …

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Freud and beyond. A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lesprit_createur/v042/42.4.benstock.pdf

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"These narratives of racial passing have risen from the dead": redefining racial passing in the twentieth and twenty-first century literary imagination

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"These narratives of racial passing have risen from the dead": redefining racial passing in the twentieth and twenty-first century literary imagination