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The task of identifying various contributions, other than Freud’s, to the development of a person-oriented position in psychoanalysis begins with Melanie Klein. She may be thought of as an amphibian, a creature who swims in the great sea of Freudian instinct theory but travels as well on the solid land of object relations. She accepts libido theory without reservation. She does more than merely accept the idea of a death instinct. She embraces it, thinking of it as innate in infants and as giving rise to fears of annihilation and persecutory anxiety (1952a, 198). Her views of the importance of human sexuality parallel Freud’s and often take the form of comparably extreme statements, such as her claim that behind every [!] type of play activity of children “lies a process of discharge of masturbatory phantasies” (1932, 31). Grosskurth, writing in connection with the case of Richard, quotes E. R. Geleerd as remarking, “Klein’s random way of interpreting does not reflect the material [of the Richard case] but, rather, her preconceived theoretical assumptions regarding childhood development” (1986, 270). Grosskurth then quotes from her own interview with Richard:

The only toys I can remember were the battleships. I mentioned to you this morning that I remember going on about the fact that we were going to bomb the Germans, and seize Berlin, and so on and so on and then Brest. Melanie seized on b-r-e-a-s-t, which of course was very much her angle. She would often talk about the “big Mummy genital” and the “big Daddy genital,” or the “good Mummy genital” or the “bad Daddy genital” . . . a strong interest in genitalia. (273)

In Klein’s defense it is only fair to say that her preoccupation with aggression balances her interest in sexuality. As Dr. David Slight, another of her analysands, put it, “Freud made sex respectable, and Klein made aggression respectable” (Grosskurth 1986, 189).

In contrast to her reliance on instinct theory, on the other hand, Klein’s work has been celebrated for its conceptualization of a personal world of internalized objects, “a world of figures formed on the pattern of the persons we first loved and hated in life, who also represent aspects of ourselves” (Riviere 1955, 346). In its early stages, this is a terrifying world: “The idea of an infant of from six to twelve months trying to destroy its mother by every method at the disposal of its sadistic tendencies—with its teeth, nails and excreta and with the whole of its body, transformed in imagination into all kinds of dangerous weapons—presents a horrifying, not to say unbelievable, picture to our minds” (Klein 1932, 187). Before they become whole ones, the objects of this world are “part objects” by virtue of the process of splitting: “The good breast—external and internal—becomes the prototype of all helpful and gratifying objects, the bad breast the prototype of all external and internal persecutory objects” (1952a, 200). Worth noting is the frequency with which Klein broadens sexuality and aggression into experience-near terms like “love” and “guilt”: “Synthesis between feelings of love and destructive impulses towards one and the same object—the breast—give rise to depressive anxiety, guilt, and the urge to make reparation to the injured love object, the good breast” (1952a, 203). The objects of this inner world follow law-like mental processes, among them, introjection, projection, and projective-identification. Most important for its implications for a person-oriented theory of object relations, Klein envisions a world of internalized objects in which sexual aims and sexual objects are not, as in Freud, isolated from each other: “There is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life” (1952b, 53).

Because of the extent to which he repudiated instinct theory in favor of an object-relations orientation, Fairbairn’s role was even more pivotal than Klein’s. Fairbairn did away with the death instinct, and with the id. He states the relevant positions succincdy in his synopsis (1963): “There is no death instinct; and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation” (224). “Since libido is a function of the ego and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation, there is no such thing as an ‘id’” (224). He almost, but not quite, did away with libido as well, his most revolutionary statement in this regard being, “The ego, and therefore libido, is fundamentally object-seeking” (224). Fairbairn launched what looked like a frontal, all-out attack on libido theory in his 1941 paper, where he devoted an early section of the paper to “the inherent limitations of the libido theory,” arguing that the time has come for classic libido theory to be transformed into a theory of object relations, that “the great limitation of the present libido theory as an explanatory system resides in the fact that it confers the status of libidinal attitudes upon various manifestations which turn out to be merely techniques for regulating the object-relationships of the ego” and that “the ultimate goal of libido is the objert” (1952, 31; italics Fairbairn’s). Although Fairbairn did not fully and officially liberate himself from the concept of libido, he may be said to have done so in a virtual way. One sees this change, for example, in the case he mentions of a female patient so desperate for attention and affection from her father, a detached and unapproachable man, that the thought occurs to her one day, “Surely it would appeal to him if I offered to go to bed with him!” (1952, 37). Fairbairn’s “take” on this thought is that it constitutes a kind of pseudo-incest: “Her incestuous wish thus represented a desperate attempt to make an emotional contact with her object” (37; italics added). Later he adds, “What emerges as clearly as anything else from the analysis of such a case is that the greatest need of a child is to obtain conclusive assurance (a) that he is genuinely loved as a person by his parents, and (b) that his parents genuinely accept his love” (39). The frustration of not being loved, and not having his love accepted, “is the greatest trauma that a child can experience,” writes Fairbairn (40), who, in contrast to Freud’s tendency to think in terms of quantities of excitation, stresses “the quality of dependence upon the object” (40) and, by implication, the quality of treatment by the object.

Fairbairn needs to be recognized as an important forerunner of attachment theory, especially in connection with his remarks on wartime neurosis and psychosis. His experience of military cases leaves him in no doubt that “the chief predisposing factor in determining the breakdown of a soldier . . . is infantile dependence upon his objects,” the most distinctive feature of military breakdowns being “separation-anxiety” (1952, 79-80). He discusses several cases (256-88). The drift of the problems is that those who seem to need to go home because they are ill in actuality become psychologically ill because they need to go home! In line with what Fairbairn has in common with attachment theory (though in a different context), Greenberg and Mitchell remark that for Fairbairn “the essential striving of the child is not for pleasure but for contact. He needs the other. If the other is available for gratifying, pleasurable exchange, the child will enter into pleasurable activities.” But if the parent offers only painful or unfulfilling contacts, they add, “the child does not abandon the parent to search for more pleasurable opportunities. The child needs the parent, so he integrates his relations with him on a suffering, masochistic basis” (1983, 173).

The work of Winnicott is so well known and so uncontroversial as to warrant summarizing his contributions to person-oriented object relations theory with a brevity disproportionate to his influence. Not being a systematic theorist may have made it easier for him to retain his official allegiance to traditional instinct theory while in practice he sustained a decidedly person-oriented position, with only occasional lapses, such as the Kleinian tenor of his technique with the so-called Piggle case mentioned earlier. Winnicott’ s contributions to person-oriented theory take many forms, one of them being his enlargement of the psychoanalytic scene by paying at least as much attention to children’s actual relationships with their real mothers as he did to their internalized (m)others. He regarded Klein as giving lip service to environmental factors but as being temperamentally incapable of giving them their due (1962, 177). Winni-cotfs concepts of transitional objects and transitional phenomena continue to be influential, as does the attention he paid to object-relational aspects of the location of cultural experience and the nature of the creative process (1971). He also helped to survey the location of the origin of madness by pinning it down, essentially, to the experience of separation anxiety (1971, 97), a position consonant with Fairbairn’s assumptions about the development of wartime psychosis. Characteristic of the fundamental soundness of Winnicott’s ideas about object relations, and perhaps representative of other things that might be included among his contributions, is his understanding of the importance of the possibility of self-object differentiation taking place without triggering unbearable feelings of interpersonal isolation. He understood the paradox that only in the presence of their mothers can children develop the capacity to be alone (1958, 29-36), and the further paradox that separateness (in the sense of being alone but not lonely) can be experienced without the loss of a sense of relatedness by virtue of the possibility of the benign internalization of the good object, and by virtue of what Winnicott refers to as the “use” of an Object (1971, 86-94).

Guntrip, who enjoyed the distinct advantage of being analyzed by both Fairbairn and Winnicott (see Guntrip 1975), makes his own contribution in the form of integrating the views of others. “The history of psychoanalysis is the history of the struggle for emancipation, and the slow emergence, of personal theory or object-relational thinking” he writes in his last book (1971, 46), where he records these developments. After criticizing Freud’s libido theory as mechanistic and nonpsychological (31-34), Guntrip classifies sexuality as an “appetite,” like hunger, thirst, excretion, and other bodily needs, and remarks, “The appetites can all be endowed with personal-relationship significance” (35). “I have never yet met any patient,” he adds, “whose overintense sexuality and/or aggression could not be understood in object-relational terms, as resulting from too great and too early deprivations of mothering and general frustration of healthy development in his childhood” (40). In praise of Klein’s contribution he writes, “She arrived at the fundamental truth that human nature is object-relational in its very essence, at its innermost heart” (58). Gun-trip also pays tribute to the strength of the social elements in the work of figures like Sullivan and Erikson. What seems most distinctive about Guntrip’s achievement in the context of the present discussion is his adoption of a definitive position, one fully embracing a person-oriented theory of object relations while rejecting drive-oriented explanations. At the same time, Guntrip contrives to be reality oriented (in the sense of external, interpersonal relationships) without obliterating, as attachment theory tends to do, the equally real realm of internalized object-relational processes.

While not all contributions to the development of a person oriented theory of object relations lend themselves to easy categorization, the group of figures Greenberg and Mitchell devote a chapter to under the heading of “Interpersonal Psychoanalysis” can scarcely be overlooked. Greenberg and Mitchell maintain that interpersonal psychoanalysis, unlike classical Freudian drive theory, does not qualify as an integrated theory. “It is instead a set of different approaches to theory and clinical practice held together by shared underlying assumptions and premises, drawing in common on what we have characterized as the relational/structural model” (1983, 79). The key figures of the group, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, began with a common starting point, “a conviction that classical drive theory was fundamentally wrong in its basic premises concerning human motivation,” and shared in common the belief “that classical Freudian theory underemphasized the larger social and cultural context” (80). Greenberg and Mitchell mention Sullivan’s claim that every major aspect of Freudian drive theory can be understood better in the context of interpersonal and social processes (87), in which connection they quote this passage: “A personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives and has his being” (90). Sullivan’s pair of theorems concerning what he refers to as “the tension of anxiety,” which I quote because of their parallel to the assumptions of attachment theory, constitute an illustration of his interpersonal emphasis. The first theorem reads, “The observed activity of the infant arising from the tension of needs induces tension in the mothering one, which tension is experienced as tenderness and as an impulsion to activities toward the relief of the infant’s needs” (1953, 39). The second one reads, “The tension of anxiety, when present in the mothering one, induces anxiety in the infant” (41).

The enlargement of a person oriented theory of object relations so as to include attachment theory is so substantial a task that discussion of the work of Bowlby and his followers will be reserved until chapter 2, except to say in passing that the concept of attachment provides a broad, fundamentally sound, empirically well-substantiated explanation of a realm of behavior crucial to the concerns of psychoanalysis.

Still to be considered are two important figures on the American scene: Margaret Mahler and Heinz Kohut. The work of both figures leans in the direction of person-oriented object relations while harking back, in various ways and to differing degrees, to a drive-oriented position. Green-berg and Mitchell shrewdly point in this connection to the dual referents of Mahler’s concept of symbiosis, which denotes an actual relationship, that between infant and mother, and an intrapsychic event, a fantasy: “It is at once a description of the behavior of two people and a metapsychol-ogical explanation of the behavior of one of them” (1983, 286). Thus Mahler creates “an interface between a developmental theory of object relations and a drive-model metapsychology” (286)—or at least tries to. Greenberg and Mitchell call into question “the extent to which she has integrated her observations into the explanatory framework of drive theory” (294). For his part, Eagle believes that Mahler’s concepts of “symbiotic gratification and particularly separation-individuation are most meaningfully understood, not in terms of (sexual and aggressive) drive gratification, but in terms of attachment behavior” (1984, 25). As for Kohut, his early work utilizes libido theory pervasively. He refers, for example, to the self itself as a structure “cathected with instinctual energy” (1971, xv), and speaks of “idealizing narcissistic libido” as “the main source of libidinal fuel” (40) for culturally valued activity (Freud’s concept of sublimation, in essence). Kohufs later work (1977) radically qualifies his reliance on drive theory in a way that makes many of his formulations seem not all that different from British object relations theory (which he seldom refers to; he employs the term “self-object” in those situations in which non-Kohutians would simply use “object”). Kohut writes that drive experiences are “subordinated to the child’s experience of the relation between the self and the self-objects” (1977, 80; italics added). “The infantile sexual drive in isolation is not the primary psychological configuration. . . . The primary psychological configuration (of which the drive is only a constituent) is the experience of the relation between the self and the empathic self-object” (1977, 122). Yet the incidence of Kohufs references to drive theory remains high in his later work. Another complication lies in the way Freud’s concept of narcissism, itself born of libido theory, constitutes the cornerstone of Kohut’s self psychology. Mahler and Kohut may both be read, if one is so inclined, as important figures in the inexorable advance of person-oriented object relations theory, even though their loyalties to drive-oriented theory proved more than mildly intractable.