ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis in North America is undergoing a period of profound turbulence. The recognition grows that the concepts of traditional psychoanalysis fail to encompass fundamental forms of developmental psychopathology not envisaged by the founders of our science or by their followers, who established psychoanalysis in the new world and became its first teachers. Influenced by the work of Heinz Kohut and his followers, this reexamination has stimulated an interest in an earlier set of divergences that began in the period from 1930 to 1965, mainly in Great Britain — object relations theory, from which development American psychoanalysts had largely been insulated. Both self psychology and object relations theory can be seen as facets of a more broadly based psychoanalytic tradition: a neverending, laborious effort, beginning with Freud’s first searching attempts, to generate concepts emanating from closer observation of hitherto unavailable or little-appreciated dimensions of subjective experience and representing more encompassing truths. In this chapter we will consider the contributions of British object relations theorists Melanie Klein, Michael Balint, and W.R.D. Fairbairn in the light of the evolution of self psychology. Space limitations preclude a similar consideration of Donald Win-nicott, one of the most important of the British object relations theorists; the reader is referred to (Brandchaft, 1986).
