ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will trace the development of Freud’s major ideas regarding the mental structures related to objects, that group of concepts which have been termed here ‘mental objects’. Freud himself did not write about the mental representations of objects (as that concept has been defined in this study, see the Introduction), although some of the ideas he discussed and developed provided the basis for the later development of that concept. Especially difficult in regard to Freud’s writings, from the perspective from which we are now viewing them, was his use of the term ‘object’ without explicitly distinguishing between the real people who were the ‘objects’ of an individual’s love and so on, and that individual’s mental images of those people.
