ABSTRACT
Object-Relations Theory: Bridge or Bypass as any inherent. sustained. powerful impulse in the infant and child; libido. need for the breast. for human contact. even Sullivan's "anxiety." The drive must be contained. defenses are set uP. and the drive emerges in distorted form. The defenses are never entirely adequate to the job of containment and the infant is consequently warped by the experience. The more powerful the drive. the earlier. developmentally. are its manifestations. In object-relations theory the person's most important and determining experience is early mother-child bonding, before the development of language. Inherent is the presumed primitive nature of infantile thought. consistent with the model of topological suppression. wherein the deeper layers of experience (that is. the earliest) are most primitive and most requiring of sophisticated control. The infant's fantasies constitute a virtual nursery Krafft-Ebing. They are fragmented, sadistic, depressed. and bizarre. Childhood is spent integrating these crude and partial percepts into a workable image of the world.
