Person
Jay Greenberg
American psychologist and psychoanalyst, trained at the William Alanson White Institute, where he became a training analyst. With Stephen Mitchell he wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), which set the drive model against the relational model and became a founding text of relational psychoanalysis. He later moved away from Mitchell's position and argued for keeping a revised concept of drive. He edited Contemporary Psychoanalysis and later The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and received the Sigourney Award in 2015.
Ideas
- 1983 introduced Relational psychoanalysis
Greenberg is the co-author of the 1983 book that gave relational psychoanalysis its name. He later moved away from Mitchell's pure relational position and went back to a revised concept of drive.
- 1983 introduced Drive/structure and relational/structure models
Greenberg, Mitchell's co-author on the 1983 book, shares credit for the two-model classification. Unlike Mitchell, he later argued that psychoanalysis cannot do without a drive concept.
Influence
Affinity
- 1983 collaborated with Stephen A. Mitchell
Both trained at the William Alanson White Institute and together wrote Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), the comparative survey that set out the drive and relational models. Later they parted ways on whether drive still has a place.
Works
- 1983
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell's book, published by Harvard University Press in 1983, compares the major psychoanalytic theories according to one question: where each places a person's relations with others. The authors distinguish two basic models. In the drive/structure model, which descends from Freud, relations with others are generated and shaped by the need to gratify drives. In the relational/structure model, relations are primary and cannot be reduced to anything more basic. The book reads Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis and the British object relations theories of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip as radical alternatives to drive theory. It reads the ego psychology of Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson and Kernberg as a strategy of accommodation, which widens drive theory to take object relations in. Kohut and Sandler are treated as mixed-model strategies that combine elements of both. A final chapter follows the divergence between the two models into debates on diagnosis and clinical technique.
References
- Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory1983Evidence for a relation