Stephen Mitchell

A fascinating look at the key components of romantic love-sex, idealization, aggression, self-pity, guilt, and commitment-argues that romance does not diminish in a long-term relationship, describes the barriers to lasting love, and offers helpful advice on how to promote an enduring love by eliminating self-destructive efforts to protect oneself from its risks.

Freud's concepts have become a part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. But psychoanalytic thinking has undergone an enormous expansion and transformation over the past fifty years. With Freud and Beyond, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black make contemporary psychoanalytic thinking--the body of work that has been done since Freud--available for the...

Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, and although previously there have been competent scholarly translations of it, until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed translator Stephen Mitchell's lithe, muscular rendering allows us to enter an ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is. His insightful...

"In 2002, with the publication of Loving What Is, Random House introdouced the world to Byron Katie and The Work. Nearly twenty years later, Loving What Is continues to inspire people across the globe to investigate their stressful thoughts, listen to the answers they find inside themselves; and open their minds to profound, spacious, and life-transforming insights. The Work is simply four questions that, when applied to a specific problem, enable...

In her first two books, Byron Katie showed how suffering can be ended by questioning the stressful thoughts that create it, through a process of self-inquiry she calls The Work. Now, she encourages us to discover the freedom that lives on the other side of inquiry. Her husband, a renowned translator of the Tao Te Ching, selected provocative excerpts from that ancient text as a stimulus for Katie to talk about the most essential issues that face us...

The influence and popularity of Rilke's poetry in America have never been greater than they are today, more than fifty years after his death. Rilke is unquestionably the most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation, of spiritual quest, that the twentieth century has known. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert a seemingly endless fascination for contemporary readers. In Stephen Mitchell's versions, many readers...

Living in Paris as he attempts to write a novel, Brigge, a young Danish aristocrat and poet obsessed with death, muses on his family, his background, and his observations of Parisian life.

Breathing, you invisible poem! World-space in pure continuous interchange with my own being. Equipose in which I rhythmically transpire. Written only four years before Rilke's death, this sequence of sonnets, varied in form yet consistently structured, stands as the poet's final masterwork. In these meditations on the constant flux of our world and the ephemerality of experience, Rilke envisions death not only as one among many of life's transformations...

"In eighty-one brief chapters, Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, provides advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit, and teaches us how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao -- the basic principle of the universe."-- Back cover of book.