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profound implications for psychoanalytic technique, which incorporates the notions of psychoanalytic situation as a dynamic bi-personal field. Levy highlights that for contemporary field theorists like Ferro (1995), the vertex of listening that results from the confluence of Bion and Baranger’s concepts, is just an angle of listening, and adds that it is no longer possible to listen to the patient without taking into account the impact on the objects and the objects on him. The structuring emotional experience that has occurred between the subject and the object, in both directions of the relationship, can no longer be left aside. For his part, Raul Hartke (2005) articulated the mixed model of the object relations theory and psychoanalytic intersubjectivity, rooted in the contributions of Bion and the Barangers with implications for analytic work with traumatized patients. Following Bion, for Hartke the function of the object is not only to satisfy or frustrate the drives of the subject, but to influence the genesis and the development of the capacity to think in the child, or, on the contrary, to hinder, inhibit or orient the child in an erroneous way. He notes that from a Bionian perspective, the Freudian notion of stimulus barrier (Reizschutz), which refers to the to the protection from the potentially overwhelming stimulation on the level of the drives, especially relevant for traumatized individuals, would correspond to that of an internal containing object, which is the result of the introjection of an external containing object.
VII. CONCLUSION
Object Relations Theories and perspectives have contributed immensely to both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. The impact reaches across the board of various psychoanalytic orientations and across all continents. Overall interest and appreciation of rich dynamics of the earliest preverbal life experiences, of primitive and archaic states and defenses, the growing recognition of the contemporary concept of a two-person analytic process, of intersubjectivity in the analytic setting, of the importance of the non-interpretive aspects of the analyst’s functioning, and a changed understanding of countertransference are just a few examples out of many of this impact. The contemporary trends in European object-relations psychoanalysis, theoretical and clinician, may be seen – i.e., against the historical backdrop of British object-relations theory – in terms of two main lines of development: the contemporary Kleinian development and more recent contributions form the Independent tradition within the British school as well as further afield in Europe. Contemporary trends in Kleinian thought remain firmly based on (i) the concept of ‘unconscious internal objects’, (ii) the central mechanisms of projection-introjection, and (iii)
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