ABSTRACT
As early as 1914, Object Relations began to take shape as a new conceptualisation of the human psyche based on conscious and unconscious connections within and between people. In a Freudian approach, the relational template is authoritative father and passionate child. Under Object Relations, this gradually changes into a relational template of the people's earliest connections, mother and infant, in all their varying emotional ramifications. Where S. Freud finds the child within the adult, focusing on the classical Oedipus Complex, Object Relations theorists see the infant in the child. The different ways in which Melanie Klein and Winnicott do this initiate the Kleinian and Independent strands of Object Relations. In Freud's earlier theoretical framework, narcissism encompasses both 'primary' and 'secondary' narcissism, before and after the infant perceives himself as separated out from the rest of reality.
