Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

by Jay R. Greenberg, Stephen A. Mitchell

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field.

Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction

437 pages, Hardcover

Published January 25, 1983

Reviews

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG.

Reading this book is like reading a Kafka short story, where the more you read, the less you understand the subject.

Thats not necessarily a bad thing.

And sometimes you kind of have to go there to learn new things, or deepen understanding.

It reminds me of learning mathematics (something I have admittedly not done anywhere near enough of).

You have to get used to a process of (a) initially not knowing what the fuck you’re doing, (b) doing it any way, (c) starting to know what the fuck you're doing, (d) becoming sorta/kinda competent, (e) going deeper, (return to step a and repeat).

Learning psychotherapy (and more specifically learning psychoanalytic theory) is DEFINITELY one of those (ad infinitum).

So back to this book.

It’s an ADVANCED dive into Object Relations theory. And as I intimated earlier. Even if you (like me) start off reading the book with a “good enough” (ish) understanding of object relations. Get ready for 400 (or more) pages of challenging (often confusing and conflicted) material.

The reason for that is, that the history of object relations is full of confusion and conflict. The early architects of object relations are trying (hard) to (a) name and describe phenomena at the absolute edge of human awareness that hither to, had not been explicitly identified, named or described, (b) come to some kind of agreement as a community of intellectuals and clinicians, (c) implement these largely ineffable notions into therapeutic practice, (d) integrate these new concepts into extant psychoanalytic theory, (e) reconcile the theory with reality, (f) revise the theories (return to step a and repeat).

So….

WHAT THE FUCK IS OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY?

Let’s start with what it isn’t.

DRIVE THEORY

Freud’s work was essentially grounded in individual drive theory, wherein human behavior is posited to be motivated by 2 basic innate biological drives like sexuality (Eros) and aggression (Thanatos). According to Freud, these drives seek expression and fulfillment, and much of human activity can be understood as an effort to channel and regulate these fundamental urges.

In Freud's tripartite model of the mind is structured into the ID (IT), the EGO (I) , and the SUPEREGO (INTERNAL RULES AND MORES), whereby, the ID is the reservoir of basic drives and operates on the "pleasure principle” seeking immediate gratification. The EGO, influenced by the "reality principle" negotiates between the ID demands and real-world constraints. The SUPEREGO serves as the moral and ethical compass, often inhibiting the drives.

Drive theory was critiqued as not sufficient to account for the importance of relationship on human motivation and development. Object Relations theory was an early (and ongoing) attempt to expand Drive Theory to include a theory of relationally.

OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

Object Relations (OR) theory attempts to describe the role of interpersonal relationships (particularly the formative relations between mother and child) on human behavior.

The term "OBJECT" refers to a literal person (MOM), or part of a person (MOMS BOOB), or a even symbol (NURTURING MOTHER) that becomes a target for one's feelings, drives, and desires.

OR suggests that our early relationships create mental representations, or "internal objects," or “interjects” that influence our later adult relationships, often in ways we are completely unaware of.

Melanie Klein is often cited as the OG of OR. After Klien, figures including Donald Winnicott (the originator of the “GOOD ENOUGH MOTHER” notion that we all learn about in therapy school), and Ronald Fairbairn, and later Erich Fromm, and John Bowlby (among others) spent the following century (give or take) elaborating, discussing, disagreeing, debating, arguing, endlessly writing, and generally kvetching about OR, and more broadly, the HUGE role that relationships and larger social systems play in human development, identity, wellbeing and behavior.

MIXED MODELS

While DRIVE THEORY and OBJECT RELATIONS seem to describe something very TRUE/REAL about human beings. They don’t always play well together in practice.

Mixed Model theories attempt to reconcile the two, at least in practice, wherein some clincial issues (e.g., neurosis) are resolved in terms of DRIVE THEORY, and others (e.g., character disorders) are resolved in terms of OBJECT RELATIONS.

This book attempts to entangle all of that.

And…

That’s a lot.

Today, this conversation continues in the dialog between (new school) relational psychodynamic approaches, and (old school) psychoanalytic approaches, with most partitioners operating in both ways.

I (personally) love all of it.

This may come as a surprise to readers of my earlier reviews, ware I bag HARD on psychoanalysis (I am a VERY slow CONVERT who used to be a VERY vocal HATER).

This book is REALLY consternating in parts, as per the nature of the material, but does a HEROIC job of explaining and organizing the disparate perspectives into something (approaching) clear (at least understandable) and useful (at least on some level), if for nothing else, than to seem smart to other clinicians 😜.

Great book 5/5

[Kira · Rating 3 out of 5]

This helped me a lot to grasp what "object relation" means to a variety of psychoanalytic theorists from the 1930s to the 1970s. Turns out it means a lot of different things, unsurprisingly. Some of the theories were much less compelling to me than others (Freud, Klein, Jacobson fairly compelling vs. Mahler, Fairbairn, Kohut, not compelling at all). But that's my take on the subject-matter, not a fair evaluation / reaction to the book itself.
The shortcoming of the book itself is that there are two theorists (I know of) whose work offers a better, more self-consistent reconstruction of the drive-theory approach to object relation than most of those covered in this book. Those are Wilfred Bion and Jacques Lacan. And the way that they (especially Lacan) reconstruct Freud's drive-theory also promises (as far as I know) to integrate and surpass the insights of the relational school treated in the book (H.S. Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann). The reconstruction of the concept of drive in terms of biological need and the demand inherent in any speech-act (enunciation), from Lacan, grounds a much more compelling synthesis of the drive-theory and relational models than those discussed in this book.
PS I'm just coming to a lot of this material, from a background in philosophy. I'm not a psychotherapist. For what it's worth.

[cate · Rating 3 out of 5]

[READ FOR COLLEGE]

let's all pretend i didn't start reading this back in september, took my psychoanalytical theory and clinic final in january, got the max grade, and only finished reading this NOW.

[Jacob Fiala · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very helpful to learn the nuances of numerous major figures' psychodynamic theories. It did an excellent job meticulously drawing out the specific similarities and differences among all of the schools of thought it considered. I believe this is a very useful goal for a book intending to veridically overview so many thinkers. However, in service of this goal, I personally feel that the contradictions among the varieties of psychodynamic theory, and the extent to which they are irreconcilable was overstated. Even going all the way back to Freud (1920), he was well aware that developments within psychology (and neuroscience) were likely to "blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis." In other words, the structural schematics drawn out in psychodynamic theories were always understood to involve floating signifiers, to some extent. This is the nature of psychodynamic theories. One theoretical formulation is drawn out a specific way to highlight that certain dynamics can explain the emergence of certain phenomena. Others are drawn out in another (possibly contradictory) way to explain other phenomena. However, these contradictions are only really irreconcilable when the theoretical constructs are reified, or in other words, taken as a literal description of a metaphysically real entity.

At the end of the day, the drive structure model was designed to serve as a stand in for neuropsychological processes. Or as Freud (1920) said "The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones." So, since its founding, I believe it has been understood that the purpose of psychodynamic theory is to posit fictional theoretical entities and the fictional rules/processes that govern the interactions among these entities in such a way as to maximize the functional equivalence between how the fictional theoretical system functions and how a human neuropsychological system functions.

Squabbling over Thinker A thinking that the Id gives rise to the Ego while Thinker B believes it works the other way around seems to me to be missing the point. Or for another example: Thinker A conceives of the Id as a structure, while Thinker B conceives of it as an emergent property of affective qualities of experience affecting motivation. While these are certainly contradictions at the literal level of the respective theories, making a great deal of this and frequently implying that the subsequent thinker's claim to consistency with the earlier thinker is disingenuous strikes me as disregarding the fact that these thinkers all understood that they were just bumping the floating signifiers around a bit. If theoretical dynamics are sketched out with linear causality, and a subsequent thinker reverses the direction, it's very easy for them to be consistent with one another when we recall that we are talking about the results of neural networks developing over time. The state of A (e.g., Id) can affect B (e.g., Ego) at time 1, and then the new state of B can turn around and effect A at time 2- and so on. In fact, this is the type of thing you'd expect in neural networks. Especially considering the floating signifier of "Id" is, no doubt, an umbrella term covering so many complex, intricate neuropsychological processes. And I would argue that affective qualities of experience spreading excitatory activation towards some potential actions and inhibitory activation towards others is a major part of what's under that umbrella (It is called the "pleasure" principle, right?). That does not negate the fact that, in certain cases, the sum effect of these intricate, complex processes is functionally best represented as a "structure" that follows a specific set of rules.

Furthermore, when certain phenomena can be explained just as well as arising from drive dynamics or relational dynamics, I think this is basically akin to the following situation. Person 1 favors explaining a phenomena by a) highlighting how various changes in neural circuitry over time determined the current state of the neural network comprising some person's brain, and b) that the current state of the neural network determined the behavior. Person 2 favors explaining how a) various changes in external circumstances led to corresponding changes in internal representations, and b) it was with reference to the current version of these internal representations that a behavior was undertaken. These 2 lines of thinking are not in conflict; they are just different levels of analysis. But revisions by any type of theorist should be understood as implying a revision at both levels. Drive theorist do not have final say just because they prefer to remain in a more neurological level of analysis (let's not forget Freud was a neurologist). In fact, if anything, this implies the relational level is probably the most appropriate level of analysis for clinicians to inhabit on a regular basis. It is hard to argue from first principles (e.g., neurology) about complex topics (e.g., the matters discussed in therapy)- especially when the first principles are not fully known but instead represented with fuzzy abstractions.

I know it's out of fashion to do so, but I think we all need to think of psychoanalysis more like a science than a school of philosophy or cultural theory if we want to get beyond the petty squabbles and consequent rivalries this book dutifully recounts with excellent precision and accuracy. Again though, this is not to discount the important contribution of a book like this. In the nuanced differences among these theories, subtly different theoretical dynamics are brought to light, implying hypotheses of subtly different neuropsychological processes that underlie them. The theories were intentionally modified in specific ways to better accommodate the wide variety of clinical presentations that these astute observers and adept theorizers encountered. As such, there are empirical reasons for the wide variety of revised models- not just self-serving, opportunistic, and political reasons. We should absolutely take a careful accounting of how the theories depart, even in small ways, from one another. I just don't think we need fret so much about them being irreconcilable at the literalistic theoretical level. We don't need some new genius- smarter than any psychodynamic theorist who has yet lived- to finally square the circle and put forth the perfect synthesis of the drive structure model and the interpersonal/relational model. Their eventual full synthesis lies in neuropsychology finally "blow[ing] away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis." In the meantime, I think we should all remember no theory is to be taken literally. And if- like me- you need something more tangible than floating signifiers to think with, then I recommend trying to anchor the psychodynamic constructs and processes with (albeit equally presumptuous and theoretical) neurocognitive constructs and processes.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read if this is your thing. It’s mine, and I learned a lot from it, but if you have little interest in psychoanalysis, the debates and distinctions here will seem arcane. It also bears some mark of age. In 1983, it was a lot easier to write a book like this, where the main arena of debate seemed *within* psychoanalysis. The prose is turgid. The lightness of touch in much of Mitchell’s other writing is not here.

Even for someone like me, relatively engaged with this area, the question kept arising: do we really have to choose between a psychology with instinctual drives at the center, and one where relationships with particular others matter? Only Freud’s silly and narcissistic push to orthodoxy in The field could make this a question to begin with.

[Cathy Hasty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book places the many writers and theorists in OR in the context of the fights and disagreements and alignments of the psychoanalytic field. It helped me see how each writer was reacting to something she or he had learned. This realization was helpful to my growing awareness of theory as more flexible and personal than monolithic, and "true." The map is not the territory.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

must read

[Lesleybuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

thorough, well written, serves its clinical purpose and also sets object relations theory within the scope of the larger context of the evolution of psychoanalytic theory. let's hope i finish it ...

[Annefhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book - helped to sort out the field and understand each psychoanalyst's contributions to theory.

[Princess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic, somewhat dense for a beginner.