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.