What have been the implications and consequences of the attempt to absorb object relations theories into the mainstream?
I will designate the most important device through which this absorption has been accomplished the "developmental tilt" and will demonstrate that the employment of this strategy has had pervasive and unfortunate consequences for the manner in which object relations concepts have been articulated and utilized in both psychoanalytic theory and technique.
The Strategy of Accommodation and the Developmental Tilt
Greenberg and I (1983) have argued that the various strategies within the complex array of contemporary psychoanalytic theories can be grouped around two basic positions, which we have termed the strategy of radical alternative and the strategy of accommodation.
Strategists of radical alternatives have abandoned the drive model completely, substituting an alternative conceptual framework to replace the weight-bearing function of the original foundation. Sullivan (1940), (1953), Fairbairn (1952) and Bowlby (1969) are the purest practitioners of this approach.
Most other contemporary psychoanalytic authors maintain a loyalty to the classical model in some form, adapting it to enable it to encompass the more general shift in the direction of relational issues. These strategists of accommodation have developed various and often ingenious devices for bracing and buttressing the drive model, stretching and altering it, to enable it to contain an increasingly greater emphasis on object relations. This more preservative approach characterizes most of the authors generally considered to be "object relations theorists."
One of the most important devices through which accommodation has been accomplished, leading to pervasive implications in the way object relations concepts have been shaped, has been the "developmental tilt"—i.e., Freud was correct in understanding the mind in terms of conflicts among drives; object relations are also important, but earlier.
To return to our architectural metaphor, it is as if a new, complex and roomy foundation level has been set beneath an older edifice; the upper stories remain just as they were, but the center of gravity has shifted downward. The original structure is intact, but unoccupied; the scene of the action has moved downward to the lower levels.
These various theories all draw on what Greenberg and I have termed the "relational model, " whose basic premises are at variance with the classical drive model. The most essential and salient feature of object relations theories, we argue, is precisely this broad and pervasive departure in fundamental paradigm.
Yet, each of these theorists—Klein, Balint, Winnicott, Mahler, and Kohut— maintains a loyalty, in one form or another, to classical drive theory.
Despite this diversity in degrees of fealty, each author requires accomodation to make room for his or her own contribution, and therefore many of these innovations have been introduced into psychoanalytic theory via the developmental tilt; consequently, the dynamic issues they depict tend to get characterized as infantile, pre-oedipal, immature, and their persistance in later life is often regarded as a residue of infantilism, rather than as an expression of human relational needs extending throughout the life cycle.
We find this tendency even in object relations theorists like Guntrip and Bowlby, who have disgarded drive theory completely, yet whose thinking has been greatly influenced by those major innovators like Melanie Klein and Winnicott who used the developmental tilt to preserve allegience to the classical system.
Authors who preserve some form of allegiance to drive theory yet introduce relational dynamics as earlier, often end up with a bifurcated view of the life cycle.
(See Feinsilver, 1983, for an incisive critique of such dichotimizations as pre- oedipal/post-oedipal, conflict/deficiency, interpretation/repair of deficits, insight/corrective emotional experience.) Is it accurate or feasible to limit relational issues to the earliest developmental phases? Do relational issues emerge sequentially over the course of early infancy, becoming progressively resolved, allowing the child to move on? The latest thinking of some of the more prominent infant researchers suggests that they do not.
