Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory p.100

Every major feature of Sullivan’s theory reflects his shift from Freud’s drive/structure principles to relational/structure premises. The basic unit in classical theory is the individual psyche, and Freud’s rich and incisive theorizing is framed by that focus. What are the events taking place within the mind? What is the ebb and flow of internal dynamic processes? Relations with others are not ignored, but interpreted in terms of, in some sense reduced to, internal mental events vis-a-vis internally arising, drive-related process. Past relations with others are contained in psychic structures; they have become absorbed into and function as forces within the individual psyche. Current relations with others, including the analytic relationship, are understood as transferential reflections of internal processes, an occasion for the projection of internal events and struggles.

The basic units in Sullivan’s interpersonal theory are the interpersonal field and the relational configurations that derive from it. The individual psyche, in this view, is a part and reflection of a larger whole, and is inconceivable outside of a social matrix. To grasp the nature of experience one must consider it within that environing medium . . .

The very stuff of experience, the ingredients of individual functioning is composed of relations with others, past and present, real and imagined. The separation of a “personality” from its network of interpersonal configurations is merely a verbal trick, an art of “perverted ingenuity” (1930, p. 258). The human organism, Sullivan stresses over and over, can only be grasped within the “organism-environment complex” and is therefore incapable of “definitive description in isolation” (1950a, p. 220). Personality, or the patterning of interpersonal situations, develops from and is composed of relations with others, and is made manifest only in the context of an interpersonal relationship: “everything that can be found in the human mind has been put there by interpersonal relations, excepting only the capabilities to receive and elaborate the relevant experiences. This statement is also intended to be the antithesis of any doctrine of human instincts” (1950b, p. 302).

The distinction between the drive/structure underpinnings of Freudian theory and the relational/structure underpinnings of Sullivanian theory concerns the basic constituents of experience, the difference between a theory of mind composed of drive-derivatives and a theory of mind composed of relational configurations.

Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell – Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory p.100

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory p.80

The interpersonal tradition has been classified as “culturalist” and re-presented, particularly by its critics, as essentially “sociological,” viewing the individual as a passive vehicle for cultural values, a blank slate on which social norms are written. This charge is common among defenders of the drive/ structure model, for whom the spatial metaphor of a psyche filled with energy derived from drives, pushing from underneath, is presumed. Within the drive/structure model, social reality constitutes an overlay, a veneer superimposed upon the deeper, more “natural” fundaments of the psyche constituted by the drives. Any theory omitting or replacing the drives as the underlying motivational principle and, in addition, emphasizing the importance of personal and social relations with others is, from this point of view, superficial by definition, concerned with the “surface” areas of the personality, lacking “depth.” The interpersonal tradition has been accused of failing to do justice to human passions, the deepest individual motivations and conflicts, viewing the individual as merely a cultural product. This constitutes a serious misreading. Sullivan, Fromm, and Horney all portray the human experience as fraught with deep, intense passions. The content of these passions and conflicts, however, is not understood to derive from drive pressure and regulation, but from shifting and competing configurations composed of relations between the self and others, real and imagined.

Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell – Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory p.80

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association p.17

A fundamental tenet of classical Freudian theory, implicitly rejected by object-relations and modern relational approaches, is the embodiedness of mental life, the idea that the mind is rooted in physical experience.

Peter Fonagy –  A genuinely developmental theory of sexual enjoyment and its implications for psychoanalytic technique,  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association p.17

Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context p.55

By this stage in her thinking, Klein’s theory had evolved considerably. In its essence lay her belief that the human infant is born with a readiness for social interactions, and so it is immediately capable of forming object relations, even though these are rudimentary and incomplete. . . The infant is thus equipped from birth to apprehend a qualitative essence in different kinds of life experiences, and so to make primary differentiations between good and bad, between what should be accepted and what should be rejected.

To Anna Freud such advanced differentiating capacities in the infant were hardly credible. They also threatened her father’s model of development, which postulated instead an initial foetal-like primary narcissism. Sigmund Freud had envisaged the young infant as noticing very little of the outside world, its existence governed by the pleasure principle, and its primitive mind drifting into dream-like hallucinatory states that hinder the full apprehension of worldly frustrations. Only gradually do such frustrations impinge on the infantile mind, thus enabling it to begin to accommodate the reality principle, and only then are object relations tenable.

Meira Likerman – Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context p.55

Love and Its Place in Nature p.160

Instead of displacing his love onto another person, the melancholic withdrew his love and his loved one into himself.

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the I, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an I-loss, and the conflict between the I and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the I and the I as altered by identification. (“Mourning and Melancholia,” SE XIV:249.)

Psychic structure, Freud realizes, is created by a dialectic of love and loss. The structure of the mind is an inner recreation of the structure of the loved world. Mental structure develops with the infant’s increasing appreciation that the loved world exists independently of him and is not immediately responsive to his wishes.

Although Freud discovered identification in his study of pathology, he realized it was the normal process by which an I comes to be. And a moment’s reflection on an I’s position in the world convinces us that this must be so. For, as we have seen, a necessary condition of there being a world for me is that I love it, or invest it with libidinal energy. Because my love affair is with a distinctly existing world, I must be disappointed by it. A distinctly existing world cannot possibly satisfy all my wishes. Out of the ensuing frustration and disappointment, I am born. Melancholia, or some archaic precursor, must lie at the heart of every I. In fact, Freud characterized identification as a regression from object-love to the most primitive form of emotional attachment, primary narcissism. “Identification,” Freud said, is “the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.” Identification is thus the most primitive form of psychic response to a loved world. Now, if primary narcissism is, for the infant, an undifferentiated psychic field from which the I and a distinct world of objects emerge, then this original “emotional tie with another person” cannot, for the infant, be an emotional tie with another person. The original identification is rather an initial differentiation by which some of the qualities of the loving mother, the loving world, are taken to exist on this side of the emerging boundary. This isn’t just a mistaken drawing of the boundary by a little cartographer; it is an active taking in. The infant takes in his mother along with his mother’s milk. Because the newborn infant is libidinally attached to the world primarily through his mouth, he fantasizes orally incorporating the loved object. Freud is not especially clear, though at times he does suggest, that the loved object is, for the infant, not yet an object. The infant has his mother for dinner, and through that meal both he and his mother come to be.

Jonathan Lear – Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis p.160

Projective Identification and Therapeutic Technique p.21

Projective identification is a psychological process that is at once a type of defense, a mode of communication, a primitive form of object relations, and a pathway for psychological change. As a defense, projective identification serves to create a sense of psychological distance from unwanted, often frightening aspects of the self. As a mode of communication, projective identification is a process by which feelings congruent with one’s own are induced in another person, thereby creating a sense of being understood by or “at one with” the other person. As a type of object relations, projective identification constitutes a way of being with and relating to a partially separate object. Finally, as a pathway for psychological change, projective identification is a process by which feelings like those that one is struggling with are psychologically processed by another person and made available for reinternalization in an altered form.

Thomas H. Ogden – Projective Identification and Therapeutic Technique p.21