ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic theory has gone through many iterations since Freud, its founding father, but what all share is a belief that human behaviour is a product of unconscious desires as well as conscious intentions, which will sometimes be in conflict. There are three relevant moments in the history of psychoanalytic theorizing: the initial, traditional, instinct or drive-based theorizing of Freud himself, centred on the individual. John Bowlby constitutes a unique, transitional figure between the first and the second moment of psychoanalytic theorizing. Melanie Klein's major revision of Freud, our second moment, was to make object-relating, not sexuality, key to understanding the neonate – a conceptual move that placed the mother, not the father, centre stage. The relational psychoanalytic work of Benjamin and Chodorow tends to start with Freud's Oedipus complex, as gender is one of their key areas of interest. Their critical look at the Oedipus complex led to significant revisions.
