ABSTRACT
Stephen Mitchell trained as an interpersonal psychoanalyst in that heterogeneous world which characterised critical thinking during the decade stretching from the end of the Sixties through the Seventies. It is that the bases of his formative influences are to be found. Mitchell makes a clearer distinction between what he understands to be Ronald Fairbairn's position and his own vision in the wake of that position. It is true that Fairbairn discerns in the relationship between analyst and patient something which corresponds to the transference and which he calls "the total relationship", existing, as he says, between the analyst and patient as people. It is for this reason that for a large section of those involved in relational psychoanalysis, and indeed Mitchell, enactment is not something that can arrive and must be avoided thanks to the analyst's greater expertise.
