IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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considerations (Rapaport and Gill. 1959, Freud, A. 1965) to the existing dynamic, structural and economic theories of Freudian metapsychology. Emerging here is an important theme: the increasing significance accorded to experiences with people in the child’s environment. With this development, growing importance is being given to new sources of unconscious contributions to transference activity. Considering mounting influence from Budapest and Berlin and later from the British Middle School analysts and the early Kleinians, contemporaries of Hartmann continued the object relations’ discussion by giving greater depth to the conscious and unconscious aspects of very early developmental periods. Edith Jacobson (1964) investigated the self and object worlds, and Margaret Mahler (1963; Mahler et al. 1975) provided the classic formulations of separation-individuation later revisited by Stern (1985). Attention was directed to the impact of the pre-Oedipal period of childhood on later development, as well as to the ways in which external controls, deriving in part from the child’s transactions with the parents, are internalized. Here the emphasis was on how the various unconscious strivings (engaged, filtered, gratified or denied within an ego psychological / object relations fabric) were molded from Freud’s (1926) central concept of childhood dangers of the loss of the object, loss of the object’s love and castration. Jacobson (1964) made a special contribution to the unconscious. She postulated that undifferentiated instinctual energy develops into libidinal and aggressive drives “under the influence of external stimulations” (1964, p. 13). Frustration and gratification, laid down as memory traces of childhood conflicts organize these affective experiences into each individual’s personally tailored pleasure – unpleasure spectrum, with personal upper and lower limits. This new ego psychological model allowed for a clearer picture of the evolution of the self and object representations thought to be present in all three psychic agencies (Id, Ego and Superego). Ego Psychology changed as theorists insisted on clinical findings to support metapsychological assumptions. Here the evolution included some members of the early group (e.g. Mahler, Jacobson) as well as new generations of thinkers (e.g., Beres, 1962; Arlow & Brenner, 1964; Kanzer, 1971; Rangell, 1952; Wangh, 1959). This new era was signaled by the Arlow and Brenner (1964) monograph, in which they collapsed the metapsychological perspective under the structural point of view. This shift helped open the door for new ways of thinking about the unconscious. This included new integrationalists such as Kernberg (1966), Kohut (1971), and Rangell (1969b). The traditional ego psychological approach had now become the structural model, an approach that was primarily accepted by a majority of analysts in North America until well into the 1970s. One of the primary changes in the zeitgeist of this thinking was a reaction against the metapsychological orientation. Informed by the methodology of ‘operationalism’ (focus on concrete operations), the anti-metapsychological emphasis was developed first in the works of interpersonal/cultural theorists HS Sullivan (1953), Horney (1941) and Fromm (1941), who often selectively used the concept only as a secondary descriptive term rather than as a major aspect of psychic life. However, even in their formulations, the ‘alienated’, ‘bad’, ‘not-me’

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