Remembering a Friend and a Teacher: Reflections on Stephen Mitchell’s Can Love Last?: Introduction to Papers by Merav Roth and Dana Amir

Abstract

Stephen Mitchell was at the apex of his creativity as a clinical psychoanalyst and analytic theoretician, and was at the cusp of courting a lay, public readership, when he died, tragically and abruptly, in 2000. At that moment, the scholarly work he was in the midst of refining was Can Love Last?, his excavation of love and the land mines that accompany it. In this introduction, Lewis Aron remembers his friend and collaborator in personal terms and discusses how Mitchell’s theoretical thinking on love continues to extend through the academic elaboration in papers by Merav Roth and Dana Amir. Aron emphasizes Margaret Black’s foreword as a text unto itself that both anticipated the inevitability of Mitchell’s sustained influence and secures his continued place in the evolution of relational psychoanalytic thinking.

Keywords:

• Can Love Last?
• Dana Amir
• Lewis Aron
• Margaret Black
• Merav Roth
• Stephen Mitchell

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lewis Aron

Lewis Aron, PhD, is the director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is cofounder of the Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research and coeditor of the Relational Perspectives Book Series (Routledge). He is author and editor of numerous books; his most recent, with Galit Atlas, is Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice (Routledge, 2017).