Modern Structural Theory

Fourth Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2019-20, 1st Trimester — Fridays, 3:30-5:00pm
Donald Schimmel, PhD
Babs Glover, MA LMHC

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November 22, 2019 — Integrations and Current Thought (con’t)

Kernberg, O.F. (2001). Object Relations, Affects, and Drives: Toward a New Synthesis. PI, 21(5):604-619.

Otto Kernberg was trained as a Kleinian but has primarily worked in ego psychology and achieved the greatest level of integration between part of the Klein-Bion model, object relations, and the modernizers of structural theory.  His developmental sequence borrows from Edith Jacobson and Margaret Mahler.  He views the individual’s internal worlds as an amalgam of attachment needs, self and object representations, and the associated affects.  He explains behavior as a consequence of the projection onto the external world of aspects of the internalized representational world.  His basic assumption is that all internalizations of object relationship with significant others, from the beginning of life on, have different characteristics under the conditions of peak affect interactions and lo affect interactions.

Blum, H.P. (2010). Object Relations in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Contrasting Views. CPS, 46(1):32-47.

Harold Blum, also an American Object Relations theorist, argues for a psychoanalytic approach which focuses primarily on intrapsychic and transference manifestations over here and now patient-analyst interactions that are deemed to be co-constructed. He asserts that interpretations derived from relationally-oriented object relations theory overemphasizes the here and now relationship of the patient and analyst and neglects the origins of the patient’s psychopathology.

Blum, H.P. (2016). A Psychoanalytic Odyssey. Am. Imago, 73(4):417-434.

Optional Reading