ABSTRACT
Stephen Mitchell's untimely death cheated everyone, his family and friends most of all, but also the field he loved and to which he offered so much. In the relatively brief span of twenty years, Mitchell set in motion changes that have reverberated ever since, and will continue to do so in any foreseeable future. It was Mitchell who, with Jay Greenberg, published the study Object Relations in Psychoanalysis (1983), which described the difference between drive/structure theories and relational/structure theories, a distinction that was eventually memorialized in the title of Mitchell's next book, the single-authored Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988), the book that more or less singlehandedly launched relational psychoanalysis. Mitchell was trained as an interpersonal psychoanalyst, and he maintained his commitment to the interpersonal perspective throughout his work, even as he created his big-tent, relational theory, including in it interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and self psychology.
