ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses some of Enrique Pichon Riviere’s most important ideas with those of psychoanalytic object relations theory derived from British contributors Klein, Fairbairn, Bion, Winnicott, and Bowlby. Klein’s work is intensely intrapsychic. Where she describes the internal interplay of the instincts affecting good and bad objects, Pichon Riviere prefers to see the role of external relationships modifying the unconscious organization of the individual. Pichon Riviere takes Fairbairn’s ego-object structure as the bedrock for the internal link, and, along with Klein and Fairbairn, uses a model of projection and introjection of unconscious psychic material. Bion was contemporary with Pichon Riviere, writing his own book on the dynamics of groups near the time Pichon was formulating the idea of operative groups. Winnicott’s best-known formulations include dividing mothering functions into those of the environment mother and the object mother, and his description of transitional objects and transitional phenomena.
