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interpretations are experienced as interpretations and not as something else; and that the ego is adequate to the task of working-through. The revised model is required in the case of severely narcissistic, borderline and psychotic patients – that is, where the centrality of the Oedipus complex cannot be assumed; but also, where the immediate interpretation of primitive pre- oedipal states runs the risk of generating a negative therapeutic reaction or else bringing about a compliant posture in the patient. Balint makes a major contribution along these lines, in the tradition of Ferenczi and the Budapest school, to our understanding of the therapeutic relationship in the case of regressed patients. The relational view of human nature is combined here with a drive-based, pleasure-oriented view of human motivation, a combination which Balint saw as theoretically and clinically irreducible. III E. Winnicott: Primitive Emotional Processes and Interpersonal Relationships Donald Winnicott presented his contribution to psychoanalysis as essentially part of the Freud-Klein tradition; while at the same time proposing a radically new theory of object- relationships. This continues to be a matter of debate among his readers, some of whom insist on the Freudian sources and foundations of Winnicott’s theoretical advances (Green 1999: 199- 200; Abram 2013: 1), while others are no less adamant in placing him in complete opposition to classical theory (Rycroft 1995: 197; Fulgencio 2007; Loparic 2010). 1. Winnicott furnished object-relations theory with a model of normal development in which “continuity of being is health” (1988: 127). This is a basic assumption of psychoanalysis for Winnicott (1954: 281), the idea that “health implies continuity in regard to…evolutionary progress of the psyche and that health is maturity of emotional development appropriate to the age of the individual”. Winnicott thus describes a related series of ontological movements as so many developmental achievements: (i) “from a relationship to a subjectively conceived object to a relationship to an object objectively perceived” (1960: 45); (ii) from absolute dependence through relative dependence towards independence, implying an internalized environment (1963b); and (iii) from the primary unintegrated state of the personality to the organized individual personality characterized by oedipal structure. The inherited potential or primary creativity of the immature infant achieves “unit status” (1960: 44) – i.e. the infant becomes a whole person capable of interpersonal relationships – on condition that the mother meets the infant’s relational needs in different ways at the various stages of individual development. The primitive relationship between mother and infant isn’t seen as “a derivation of instinctual experience, nor of object relationship arising out of instinct experience” (1952: 98). Rather, maternal provision is seen as independent of the satisfaction of instinctual needs. It is the environment which allows for the possibility of experiencing drives, or enables the infant to make use of instinct: “it is not instinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be…It is the self that must precede the self’s use of instinct” (1967: 116). Winnicott posits an initial experience of omnipotence in which potentiality is realized as illusion. The mother’s adaptation, when good enough, provides an “opportunity for the
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