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includes the death instinct) that springs from the adaptive failure of anger, in the form of protest, to rectify a bad situation. When activated, the destructive ensemble sounds an alarm of anxiety about the unknown limitless engulfing chaos. Extending Bion’s line of thought, Grotstein sees both anger and later hate as manic defenses against one’s sense of helplessness in the face of Bioninian dread of “O.” IV. Fg. Contemporary Self Psychology & Relational Approaches The contemporary relationists’ view of drive is a complex matter. Relational analysts are sually identified as a movement of diverse thinkers with roots in post-Kleinian object relations theory, self-psychology, and inter-subjective theories, with such progenitors as Sándor Ferenczi and/or Harry Stack Sullivan. Charles Spezzano (Mitchell & Aron, 1999, p. 285) suggested to define the relational movement as the ‘American Middle Group’ – “that operate[s] in the fertile [dialectical] tension between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal – seeing it as revolutionary and evolutionary” at the same time. In the seminal writing of Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), one sees the background of a fundamental epistemological debate, i.e., the opposition between essentialism and constructivism, much discussed within social sciences and gender studies. In essentialism one starts out from given “materials”, i.e., objects with certain fixed characteristics. The world, including humans, consists of “things” defined by pregiven categories. These categories may be biological entities, like gender, sexuality, or drive. Constructivists, in contrast, start out from a social matrix – like family or cultural dynamics – within which the world is built. The world is not “there”, it is “constructed”. Many Relationists see classical drive theory as imbued with essentialist presuppositions. They do not deny the existence of biological facts, including drive templates, but offer a specific perspective on them, i.e., a postmodern perspective of meaning- construction taking place in a relational context. If the issue of drive in Relational psychoanalysis is approached as the reductive polarized question of origins, such as ‘Is the subject constituted from within, from impulses independent of relations, from a given reality pre-determined by biological conditions? Or is the starting point a relation through which all psychic reality, including sexuality, aggression, and in fact all motivations, are constituted?’, the answer would be equally reductive and polarized: The relationists adhere to the latter point of view, seeing drive theorists as proponents of the former one (Mitchell & Aron, 1999). It is in line with such an inquiry, that, traditionally, Self and Relational approaches minimized drive endowment as playing important part in development, motivation and analytic process. However, while Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell (1983) initially suggested that object relation theories and drive theories were incompatible, Greenberg (1991) later reaffirmed the importance of the sexual and aggressive drives, while stressing their dependence on environmental influences. In a similarly nuanced way, Mitchell (1993) later viewed
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