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Contemporary trends in North American psychoanalytic culture, with respect to Object Relations theories, include various integrative conceptualizations of intrapsychic object and self-representations, regarded today as dynamically evolving in conjunction with drive, affect, memory, and cognitive processes. The interaction of drive, affect, internalized object relations, and external object relationships in the development of psychic structure is viewed as paramount to developmental continuities and transformations from variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. Reviewing historical divisions between object relationships and drive theory, some point to a ‘false dichotomy’ between them, as they are both interwoven in development and throughout life. The intrapsychic (self and object) representational world is partly derived from interactions with the ‘real’external object world, but it is also molded by its internal dynamic ‘motors’. In contemporary North American psychoanalysis of all orientations, there is a growing recognition that that the initial formulations of the drive theory did not take sufficiently into account the real attributes of the object and identification with the real object. Paradoxically, alongside these integrative tendencies in the North American psychoanalytic literature, new contemporary controversies emerge and outline potential fruitful areas of further study, such as assertion of the early neurobiological and dynamic developmental appearance of bi-directional non-linear strivings for both symbiotic (dual) unity and differentiation of self and other, beginning in the first weeks of life . Another area of fruitful contemporary controversy surrounds the manner of applicability of early infant-caregiver dyad developmental findings to the adult clinical situation. This is a matter of continuing discussion and further research, and requires caution not to sidestep the complexities of further developmental transformations and adjustments to life events For many North American authors, a true integrative theory of psychic development requires embracing new epistomological models such as systems and complexity theory, which provide for nonlinear and emergent phenomena. The human subject’s radical dependence on others, particularly in early childhood but partially throughout life as well, is an undeniable fact appreciated by psychoanalysts of all theoretical orientations. Since Kant, we have known that it is impossible to literally ‘swallow an external object’ or to have direct access to it. There is always the filter and the process of the subject’s mind in between perception and representation. But the particular articulation and weight between constitutional factors/potentialities and the human environment in the fashioning of the unconscious mind and the rest of the psychic apparatus and their technical implications in the analytic session remain hotly contested and lie, depending upon the theorist, all along the “complementary series”, supported by Freud.
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