Mitchell takes the title from Sandro Ferenczi's diary of his attempt to provide treatment. A contemporary of Freud, Ferenczi wrote in great detail about the experience of analysis from the psychiatrist's side and was well before his time in acknowledging not only the emotional limitations but the perils of countertransference. Mitchell uses him because in his history of the analytic movement the most contemporary practitioners are very much on about the way the shrink's presence is a factor. There is no objectivity and Mitchell wants practioners to pay closer attention to their own baggage. I am extremely grateful to have found Mitchell. I came to him because he was recommended as a relational psychologist but found that he is one of the great synthesizers of psychiatric practices and theories. He starts with Freud and the drive theory and then moves on to Object Relations but does so with an eye to looking at how our sense of self has developed at the substrata of these theories. The prose is lucid. He has a gift of explaining extraordinarily complicated even emphemeral (sp) positions beautifully. At the end he leaves us with the notion that is closet to relational psychology which is a description of self that relies on a temporal rather than a spatial model. We run through various selves or have various selves that we deploy depending upon the situation. The modifications of identity are opportunistic and often defensive but in a constant process of evolution. According to Mitchell even while this is happening to the analysand so too for the attending. I will continue to look for more by him. Terrific book as an overview. Want more on Winnecott. ( )