ABSTRACT
Ronald Fairbairn changed the focus to people as the object of drives, shifting psychoanalysis from its focus on the inner world of fantasy and phantasy to an interpersonal world. Michael Balint enhanced this way of thinking, contributing the notion of the “basic fault,” the time of the first two-person relationship and primary love, which comes long before the Oedipal conflict and three-person dynamics.
Donald Winnicott is the major intellectual force of the middle school, contributing innumerable ideas and concepts: true self and false self; going-on-being; there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother—baby dyad; ruth and ruthless; good enough mother; environmental mother and object mother; transitional space and transitional object; collecting impingements—to name only a few. He knew that when compliance and defense constrict an individual, what is lost is the capacity to play, the connection to that inner space of essential aliveness and freedom. Regaining that connection is the goal of analysis.
Harry Guntrip, too, was deeply interested in the first months and years of life and believed that the first environment needed to be immersed in a “loving merger.” Without this early loving merger, various painful states become lifelong companions.
The contemporary Christopher Bollas continues the themes of the middle school, contributing the “unthought known,” the “transformational object,” and the “destiny drive.”
