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conceptualization of “images”, or representations of self and other as the key determinants of mental functioning (Fonagy, 2001). She believed that an infant acquires self and object representations with good (loving) or bad (aggressive) valences depending on the experiences of gratification or frustration with the mother. “She introduced the term representation to stress that this concept refers to the experiential impact of internal and external worlds and that representations are subject to distortion and modification irrespective of physical reality” (Fonagy, 2001, p. 56). Self concepts were seen as complex structures including “the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious intrapsychic representation of the bodily and mental self in the system ego” (Jacobson 1964, p 19). In her seminal work, The Self and the Object World (1964), Jacobson essentially revised Freud’s ideas about the development of libido and aggression and extended the functional impact of the drives. Her purpose was to merge relational with classical metapsychological theory, i.e. to align the economic point of view with the phenomenology of human experience because she felt that it was this experience which highlighted the role of relations with others. She used two complementary theoretical strategies to achieve this goal. The first was a focus on the child’s experience of herself in her environment – what Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962) termed the “representational world”. The child’s representational world was derived from an innate psychobiological substrate. Jacobson proposed that the instinctual drives were not “givens” but rather “innate potentials” that were shaped both by internal maturational factors as well as by external stimuli, particularly in the context of early relationships, which in turn shaped the child’s representational world. This biological approach allowed her to maintain ties with earlier drive/structural models. Her second theoretical approach was a revision of the economic principles themselves leading to the conclusion that “energy theory must be brought into greater synchrony with the vicissitudes of object relations” (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983, p 306). In Jacobson’s view the infant’s experience of pleasure or unpleasure is the core of her relationship with her mother (drive/structure model). From the start, experience is registered in terms of how it feels to the baby. She postulated that the feeling tone of one’s earliest experiences contributed to the consolidation of libido and aggression and lay the groundwork for self and object images determining how we ultimately feel about ourselves and others. Frustrating or upsetting experiences produce images of a frustrating, withholding mother and an angry frustrated self while more positive experiences lead to an image of a loving, giving mother and a happy contented self. Jacobson’s theory therefore addressed the interplay between actual experiences and drives. Jacobson (1954) noted that in the infant, before the formation of self-other boundaries, when the earliest images are fused rather than distinct self-contained units, at the level of mental representation the child’s perception of the other directly shaped the experience of the self. In this state of primitive fusion objects become internalized parts of self images and ultimately one’s most profound sense of self is an outgrowth of these earliest images. Jacobson noted that the integration of good and bad images i.e. both the “good’ and “frustrating” mother facilitated the ability to integrate conflictual feeling states. Ultimately,
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