IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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III. D. Bowlby Having been supervised by Melanie Klein, John Bowlby was dismayed by what he saw as her exclusive interest in the child inner phantasy life and dismissal of the child’s real relationship with his mother. In his detailed analysis of early infant development, especially effects of traumatic separation from the mother or mother’s emotional inaccessibility, Bowlby (1969) viewed the attachment to mother as the primary drive. In contrast to Fairbairn’s ‘primary object drive’, he does not attend to the internal structuralization, stressing rather behavioral and interpersonal patterns. Diamond and Blatt (2007) saw his work as providing an account of behavioral expression of the internalized object relations within the mother-infant dyad. III. E. Sandler In Britain, Sandler (1963), and Joffe and Sandler (1965) suggest that cognitive development, affective development, and the development of the structures representing internalized object relations are intimately linked. Focusing on the studies of development of self-structures, they arrive at a position similar to that of Jacobson in North America (1964), namely that identification, necessarily involving a modification of self-representation under the influence of object-representation depends on the extent to which a particular self- representation fits into the individual’s overall defensive configuration.

IV. FURTHER AND CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND RELATED CLINICAL APPLICATIONS IN EUROPE

IV. A. Kleinian Developments Bion (1963) completes the shift in Klein’s thinking from a theory of successive developmental stages to a theory of ‘positions’ – namely, the paranoid schizoid and depressive positions. Thus rather than thinking in the form of PS →DP he uses the equation PS↔DP, indicating how the positions oscillate throughout life. John Steiner (1981, 1987), building on the work of Joan Riviere (1936), Herbert Rosenfeld (1964, 1971), Donald Meltzer (1968), Hanna Segal (1972) and Edna O’Shaughnessy (1981), shows how a so-called ‘pathological/defensive organisation’ can provide another position, one that defends against both persecution and depressive guilt, stabilising but at the same time stultifies and damages the personality. In analysis, the emergence of pathological/defensive organization and oscillation between the two positions can be schematically described as:

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