ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has a history of addressing matters related to death, including Freud's (1920) theorizing on the death instinct, and Melanie Klein's (1957) on the impact of this instinct on psychological development beginning in the earliest days of infancy. The death instinct has been looked at as an explanation for repetition, separation, experiences of psychological and physical disintegration, and aggression. However, other psychoanalytic authors (e.g., Winnicott, 1963; Bowlby, 1969; Mahler et al., 1975; Stern, 1985; Blanck and Blanck, 1986; Beebe and Lachman, 1988) saw greater utility in focusing on the individual's experience of others early in development and the internalization of that experience as more crucial to explanations of psychological development than instinct. Many contemporary psychoanalytic authors and those whose thinking in¯uenced these authors (e.g., Strachey, 1934; Jacobson, 1971; Stolorow and Lachmann, 1984±1985; Ferenczi, 1988; Mitchell, 1988; Ehrenberg, 1992; Bromberg, 1993; Hirsch, 1994; Aron, 1996; Slochower, 1996) have emphasized the impact of current relationships, particularly the one between analyst and patient, on the perpetuation or transformation of various aspects of the patient's psychological functioning.
