Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
The map of the field. Drive-structure against relational-structure, argued fairly on both sides.
For Freud the object must suit the impulse, while for theorists of the relational model the impulse is simply one way of relating to the object.
Greenberg and Mitchell read the whole of psychoanalytic theory through a single organising distinction. On one side stands the drive/structure model, which retains Freud's instinct theory and treats a person's ties to others as derivatives of drive. On the other stands the relational/structure model, in which relationships are primary and constitutive rather than secondary to bodily need. Across close readings of Freud, Sullivan, Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut and others, the authors trace how each theorist positions himself between these poles, and where hidden compromises leave an argument unstable. Their central claim is that the two models rest on incompatible premises about human motivation, so the frequent attempts to fuse them produce theories that borrow terms without reconciling foundations. First published in 1983, the book gives the clinician a way to locate any concept, technique or supervisor's assumption within the field, and to see what each position commits one to.
About the authors
Jay Greenberg
Jay R. Greenberg is an American psychoanalyst who edited Contemporary Psychoanalysis and later The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. With Stephen Mitchell he wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), a study that maps two organising frameworks across the field: the drive/structure model and the relational/structure model. His own writing addresses the theory of technique and the analyst's neutrality, arguing that clinical stance follows from theoretical commitments rather than standing apart from them. He was born in 1942 and continues to practise and write.
Stephen A. Mitchell
Stephen A. Mitchell (1946 to 2000) was an American psychoanalyst, the central figure in the founding of relational psychoanalysis. He co-founded the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues and the relational training programmes at New York University's postdoctoral programme. His relational-conflict model locates mind within relationships rather than instinct, and integrates the interpersonal and object relations traditions into one framework. With Jay Greenberg, in Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, he mapped the field these two lineages had built.
Details
- 1983
- English
- Harvard University Press
- Harvard University Press, 1983
- 456
- 9780674629752