ABSTRACT
Relational models of personality development and psychotherapy-that is, theories emphasizing the centrality of relationships, both fantasied and real, with other human beings-are now commonplace in psychoanalysis (e.g., Aron, 1996; Atwood & Stolorow, 1984; Benjamin, 1995; Bromberg, 1998; Mitchell, 1988; Mitchell & Aron, 1999; Ogden, 1997; Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1999; Skolnick & Warshaw, 1992). Such models are widely seen as deriving from a complex mix of British object relations theory, American interpersonal theory, and Kohutian self psychology (see Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). Indeed, a chief argument of Greenberg and Mitchell’s now-classic summary of object relations theories in psychoanalysis is precisely that there is a bifurcation between the drive model posited by classical psychoanalysis and ego psychology on the one hand and the relational models variously proposed by the British theorists, the interpersonal school,
Unfortunately, this version of psychoanalytic history omits the contributions of psychoanalytic scholars who were influenced by the work of David Rapaport and his colleagues (Rapaport, 1951, 1967; Rapaport, Gill, & Schafer, 1945-1946), and yet these theorists (e.g., Gill & Holzman, 1976; Holt, 1989; Klein, 1976; Schafer, 1976), by rigorously challenging the Freudian metapsychology they learned from Rapaport, were just as essential as were figures like Fairbairn (1952), Sullivan (1953), Winnicott (1958, 1965), and Kohut (1971, 1977, 1984) to the transformation of psychoanalysis from a oneperson psychology focused on drive, energy, and structure to a two-person psychology in which the vicissitudes of human relationships are primary. Furthermore, another crucial aspect of the work of many of these post-Rapaportian theorists was their reliance on empirical research as an impetus to their theoretical revisions. Thus, Greenberg and Mitchell’s (1983) account of post-Freudian developments in drive and energy theory contains chapter-length discussions of the work of Heinz Hartmann, Edith
Jacobson, Otto Kernberg, and Margaret Mahler, all theorists whose ideas in some significant way descend from classic psychoanalytic drive theory, but has scarcely a word about either Rapaport’s attempt to systematize the Freudian metapsychology-to wed drive theory and cognitive psychology, motives and thought-or his students’ eventual rejection of this effort in favor of what Gill (1983) termed the person point of view in psychoanalysis. In their discussion, which Greenberg and Mitchell regarded as a dichotomy between drive/structure and relational/structure theories, they also are explicitly silent on the role of empirical research in sorting out the differences between drive and relationship views and potentially integrating them. Meanwhile, traditional psychoanalytic theorists (e.g., Arlow & Brenner, 1964), in their classic attempt at systematizing Freud’s structural and drive theories, did not mention at all Rapaport’s efforts at constructing a more rigorous account of the metapsychology.
