Stephen A. Mitchell Quotes & Sayings

In breaking down the developmental journey through successive states of psychic organization, Mahler enabled clinicians to understand more deeply and treat more effectively children and adults who came to be officially diagnosed as borderline patients, whose severe pathology fell between the classifications of neurosis and psychosis. — Stephen A. Mitchell

Anna Freud's book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936) was a partial response to this problem. It became a psychoanalytic field marshal's handbook, documenting and illustrating various unconscious defensive strategies of the ego, alerting the clinician to telltale signs of their operation in the patient's psyche. Reorienting — Stephen A. Mitchell