ABSTRACT
Otto Kernberg calls his perspective on psychoanalytic theory an 'ego psychological object relations model'. This model is an attempted integration of ideas from three dominant psychoanalytic schools: the Kleinian school, British object relations theory, and American ego psychology. The starting point for Kernberg's specific study of affects in 1976 is his opposition to Freud's 1915 policy of separating the concept of drive cathexis from that of affect cathexis and of separating the concept of drives from that of instincts. Kernberg claimed that this policy moved affects two steps away from their biological foundations. Kernberg believed that efforts to accord affects a place in ego psychology should lead to their conceptualization in such a manner as to allow them to be linked in a new way with self and object representations and with the drives. In 1982, Kernberg is concerned with the place of the self in structural theory.
