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the revised theory of drives as the main determinants of motivation in conjunction with ‘internal objects’. The increasing emphasis in post-Kleinian thinking on the oscillation throughout life between the ‘paranoid schizoid’ and ‘depressive’ positions, continues to yield new clinical findings. The developments range from new insights into aspects of constitutional envy, types of pathological organisation, and primitive and psychotic forms of the Oedipus complex to ongoing developments in Kleinian technique – including, the dynamics of psychic change, working-through in the countertransference, and ‘patient-centred’ and ‘analyst centred’ interpretations. The whole range of the contemporary Kleinian development in theory and practice remains underpinned by the contributions of child analysis and child psychotherapy, particularly with non-neurotic structures. Contemporary developments in Independent object-relations psychoanalysis are rooted in an alternative series of theoretical and clinical preoccupations: human interaction, affect, environment, trauma, and attachment. The contemporary trends in this perspective, or set of perspectives, reflect the historic realignment of the classical Freudian model of the mind in terms of broad conceptualization of drives (including, most notably the life drive or ruthless love), rather than simply appetitive drives and climactic satisfactions. External reality, therefore, continues to be seen by Independent analysts as a major source of the objects that become internalised, with a concomitant technical emphasis, in the analytic encounter, on the affective response of the analyst to the patient’s conscious and unconscious communications. A contemporary generation of psychoanalysts in the Independent tradition are engaged in the explorations of an object-relations approach to, for instance, temporality, modes of incorporation and types of ‘invasive object’, types of blank pain, the nature of illusion, the meaning of psychic home, aspects of listening in the transference-countertransference, idleness and the work of the negative, and the psychoanalysis of hope. Similarly, in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, where the early genealogy of object relations emerged from Klein’s psychoanalysis of children’s play, the regional elaborations of object relations theories have been rooted in the Kleinian theory and it´s developments mainly in Bion, Meltzer and Winnicott. In this context, Pichon Riviere, ‘the psychosocial face’ of Argentine psychoanalysis, initiated an important regionally specific trend with his idea that social psychology should be viewed as psychoanalytic, while psychoanalysis itself should be understood as a social psychology. This idea, followed by many of his disciples, allowed for many original theoretical formulations of different kind of objects: good, dead, half dead half alive, maddening, phobic, and the effects of the shadows of those objects especially in mourning and melancholy. In addition, clinical explorations of early transferences, modalities of object relations in the psychoanalytic process, the analytic situation as a dynamic field, the discovering of relatedness through objects to links, and “ lo vincular ” confront the clinical frontiers of contemporary object relations theory. These, together with important theoretical and clinical explorations of ‘the feminine’ and hypochondria, and inquiry into the intersubjective dimension of object relations, especially in regard to traumatized patients, represent the main contributions and trends in Latin America to object relations theories and related clinical practice.
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