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Reflections on Object Relations

in Psychoanalytic Theory
Jay R. Greenberg Ph.D.
Published online: 31 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Jay R. Greenberg Ph.D. (2013) Reflections on Object Relations
in Psychoanalytic Theory, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 49:1, 11-17, DOI:
10.1080/00107530.2013.10746527
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2013.10746527

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JAY R. GREENBERG, Ph.D.

REFLECTIONS ON OBJECT RElATIONS

IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY.'

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lWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER*

Keywords: Object relations, history of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theories

OMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE as I was thinking about preparing for

this anniversary colloquium I decided not to prepare any written remarks. It was a bit of a hard decision; I thought there might be a lot of
people here today, and I am very aware that our transferences to the institute where we trained never really go away, so I knew that speaking
without a written paper would result in my feeling much more anxious
than if I did have one. Naturally, I wondered why I'd chosen to face the
anxiety, and the first thing that came to mind was my father's voice-I
told you that these transferences last-saying "Well, that's you, of course."
Which was something that he often said, and which I never really understood, although I didn't take it as a compliment and figured that it was a
rough equivalent of "You have nobody to blame but yourself."
That's true, I don't, but I can stand up to my father and say that blame
isn't really the issue; I've made a choice, and anxiety is the price I've
chosen to pay for something that's important to me. And what's important is the chance to be in this moment, in this place, with these people
and to live the experience as fully as possible. Because the book we're
talking about today is very much of this place, of these people, and of a
friendship that grew here, although it comes from a very long time ago.
And the best way to reconnect with it, which is something I don't do
except maybe implicitly in the course of everyday life, is to immerse myself in this moment as fully as possible. Today is very poignant for me,

, This paper was presented in 2010.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 49, No. 1. ISSN 0010-7530
2013 William Alanson White Institute, New YOlk, NY. All rights reserved.

11

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12

JAY R. GREENBERG, Ph.D.

and I want to be here in a way that shapes the remarks I make, wherever
they go.
Milt made the comment that the Object Relations book was seen by
many as both a blessing and a shock, and that is certainly true; Steve and
I lived through a lot of both. On the one hand, there was a tremendous
appreciation for some of the work we had done, on the other hand, there
was fairly widespread dismay. I remember that in 1986, a couple of years
after the book came out, we were invited to do a "Meet the Author" session at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in
Washington, DC, and one of the discussants saw the book as a blessing
and made what struck me at the time as a very interesting and generous
remark. He said, "The greatest indictment of our training in the American
Psychoanalytic is that this book couldn't have been written by one of our
graduates." The other discussant, who had a somewhat different point of
view said, "The question about this book is not whether it is well done,
it certainly is, the question is whether it should have been done at all."
And his answer, as you can imagine, was in the negative, and it was
negative for some of the reasons that both Milt and Margaret alluded to,
which was that it was seen as both dichotomizing and, probably more to
the point, leveling the playing field among different theoretical points of
view. So we did dichotomize, but more importantly we were saying that
one conceptual model is not subsumed by another, and that the models
cannot subsume each other. That was the position we took that caused,
I think, a great deal of dismay.
Now I should say, to be completely fair, that the dismay was not
restricted to the American 'Psychoanalytic Association; there was a certain amount of dismay within the White Institute. The issues were similar here-not everybody was happy about our trying to level the playing field. People at White were dismayed about a couple of different
things, both interesting and illuminating when you think about our history as an institute and also, more broadly, about the history of psychoanalysis.
First, we said that the drive model-the model that the Interpersonal
tradition was explicitly rejecting-also had its own legitimacy. Of course,
this aspect of what we were saying wasn't noticed so much by mainstream psychoanalysts, who thought that the book was a Relational tract;
it still isn't widely appreciated even today. But it certainly was noticed at
White that we were saying that if you started with certain premises,
premises that occupy a kind of borderland between psychology and phi-

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REFLECTIONS ON OBJECT RELATIONS

13

losophy, you wind up with some version or another of a drive theory.

And then we argued that, in the same way, if you start with other, alternative premises you wind up with some version or another of an Interpersonal/Relational position.
This levels the playing field because the premises on which the two
models are based cannot, of course, be validated by the theory; rather,
the integrity of the theory rests on the premises themselves. And they
certainly cannot be validated by clinical work, for any number of reasons
that have been widely discussed by critics of psychoanalysis and by adherents as well. Recently there have been widespread arguments about
whether the premises can at least be supported, if not validated, by data
from other fields-neuroscience and infant observation especially, but
also anthropology, evolutionary biology, and so on. This is not something I can go into today, but I continue to be skeptical about attempts to
demonstrate the superiority of one theory over another by drawing on
data from other disciplines.
In any case, Steve and I wound up saying that theoretical preference is
ultimately an aesthetic and-although we didn't say this explicitly-psychologically driven choice. This mayor may not beg the question, but I
continue to believe that it captures something of the way theory is chosen and then wielded by individual clinicians. So ultimately, despite being a first shot across the bow of the theoretical mainstream, the book is
agnostic about the relative validity and even the clinical value of the two
dominant models.
The second way in which we leveled the theoretical playing field was
probably even more galling to our teachers at White: we argued that Interpersonal theory was not the only viable alternative to drive theory. Or,
to put it another way, we demonstrated that there were other Relational
approaches that shared the premises of Interpersonal theory but that developed them in slightly different, although compatible, dimensions. We
considered Fairbairn's object relations theory closely compatible with
Sullivan's Interpersonal approach, but we also found common ground in
the work of Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Kohut, and others. The idea that
there were people in other parts of the world who were saying things
that were commensurate with what was being said at the White Institute
was not received with tremendous affection, at least at the beginning.
Sullivan-recall his fondness for neologisms that conceptually differ
hardly at all from existing terms-liked to see himself as sui generis. His
followers inherited his proclivity, and they were able to point out that

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14

JAY R. GREENBERG, Ph.D.

other Relational thinkers retained many traditional terms-libido, ego,

object, and the like-which inspired Interpersonalists to see them as too
cowardly to break from an ill-conceived past.
So both the welcoming of the book and the dismay around the book
happened in all different quarters and in many different ways. For instance, John Gedo wrote a book in which he summarized what he considered the 60 most important psychoanalytic books of the past 25 years,
and he argued that the book was political in its intent. My impression is
that Gedo, viewing the landscape of psychoanalysis as he found it in the
1990s, saw that the playing field was more level than it had been before
and also that Relational psychoanalysis was increasingly influential. Noting, correctly I hope, that the Object Relations book had played a part in
carving this new terrain, he concluded that this is what we were trying to
do. I agree that this was part of the book's impact-perhaps even the
most important part-but it is not, as far as I know, what we were trying
to do.
In fact what we were trying to do was to clarify the assumptions, the
premises, and the developments within each of the major psychoanalytic
traditions. The idea to write it started because Steve and I were both
teaching at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies; I was teaching
there thanks to him. He was teaching a year-long course on the Interpersonal/object relations tradition and I was teaching a year-long course
starting with Freud and running through the American Ego psychologists.
In conversations with each other, which we had constantly over lunch or
dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant, we realized that neither of us
was quite capable of teaching our own course without referencing the
work that the other was teaching. That is, Steve was finding it necessary
to teach the ideas of Freud and his followers, which Sullivan, Fairbairn,
and others found important but inadequately emphasized and developed, and I found it necessary to teach the dissenting ideas that provoked emendations in more orthodox thinking. It was through those
conversations that we realized the need for the kind of comparative psychoanalysis that we undertook in the book, because psychoanalytic history is shaped by theorists working within traditions and institutions that
have operated relatively or entirely independently of each other, but who
nevertheless are reacting to and speaking to each other's sensibilities.
Milt characterized the book as an event that was ready to happen and
I think he's entirely right about that. The book was influential, of course,
but other developments were unfolding at around the same time, which

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REFLECTIONS ON OBJECT RELATIONS

15

I think moved things along somewhat similar lines. I've come to think
that the time was ripe for some kind of change because by the late 1970s
and early 1980s Freud's first generation followers were gone. In 1982, the
year before our book came out, Merton Gill published a book on transference that was enormously influential in shaping our appreciation of
transference and our understanding of its dynamics-for all intents and
purposes he "interpersonalized" the concept. At the same time, Donald
Spence was preparing to publish Narrative and Historical Truth, which
challenged a lot of the archeological premises of Freud's model, paving
the way to hermeneutic epistemologies and ultimately to an intersubjective understanding of psychoanalytic process. And Roy Schafer published
The Analytic Attitude, which supports, although it does not endorse, a
pluralistic vision of psychoanalytic theory.
So there was a lot going on. And the idea that it was an event ready to
happen was very much something that we heard from our publisher,
who was enthusiastic and expert about psychoanalytic thinking, having
introduced the work of both Melanie Klein and Fairbairn to North America. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that he was especially
vehement about its being an event that was ready to happen when I was
procrastinating, a not infrequent occurrence. It's only fair to say that were
it not for Steve, the book would have never come out, because I was always catching up to him. I especially remember one night-this is really
one of the iconic images of my life-when I called Steve to talk about
something that I was delayed about and Margaret answered the phone. I
should say as a piece of background that this was probably 1979, which
is when we started writing the book, and we were using typewriters,
which is part of the story. Margaret answered the phone and I got to
chatting with her, partly because I enjoyed chatting with Margaret, and
partly because I wasn't quite ready to face Steve to tell him that I was a
little bit delayed as usual. And as we were chatting, which went on for
quite a while, I heard in the background "clackity clackity clackity clackity clackity" and it didn't stop. It was very motivating, both that night and
on other occasions.
So when our publisher told us that the book was an event ready to
happen, he was certainly onto something. There was something in the
water in those days; the hegemony of the classical tradition in the United
States was starting to show some cracks. Mainstream theory itself was
ready for change, and its political/conceptual dominance was significantly weakened.

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JAY R. GREENBERG, Ph.D.

I want to spend a couple of minutes saying where I think things have

landed these days because it's a landscape that is very hard to imagine
for somebody who hasn't lived through it-another quick story comes to
mind about the atmosphere within which the book was written. I had
started at the White Institute in 1974, and had become very friendly with
one of my classmates, who was a psychiatrist. He had many friends who
were in training at the New York and Columbia institutes, and one of
their senior analysts was going to be speaking at White. So my friend said
to a friend of his, "Let's go to White and hear Dr. so-and-so speak." And
his friend brought this up in analysis, in response to which his analyst
said "Well there are other places you can go to hear so-and-so speak."
That's an example of analytic neutrality, as it was deployed in the psychoanalytic wars of the 1970s.
So that was the climate, but I have to add that the White Institute was
certainly part of it. There was an insularity here as well, and an intolerance; I've already mentioned that the idea that Sullivan and Fairbairn
were tilling the same field was anathema to a lot of people at White in
the generation or two before me. I think today that things have changed
tremendously. Margaret quoted Paul Stepansky, who laments what he
sees as the fragmentation of psychoanalysis. I wouldn't quite characterize
the state of the field that way, and at least in a qualified sense I don't lament it. I wouldn't call psychoanalysis fragmented, although I certainly
agree that there are different points of view and that-especially when
we take the international community into account-there is less communication among these points of view than I would wish for.
But this is also changing. There is an increasing openness to alternatives and it happened because of a number of different developments;
too many ways to go into today, although certainly the quality of psychoanalytic scholarship coming from outside the mainstream has been one
important factor. As a result, beginning in the late 1980s many of us have
been invited into conversations that were once closed, and today, as far
as I can tell, everybody is welcome to participate. That's one thing that's
changed; people are listening to each other more. I also believe that the
thinking of people who saw themselves as the carriers of the tradition,
the orthodox tradition, has changed. I don't think that there's a classical
analyst around who has been untouched by the Relational movement.
Some, of course, would like to respond by just saying "No," but that's
increasingly difficult today. Instead they have to say "No, because ... ,"
and this makes all the difference because it gets a conversation going

REFLECTIONS ON OBJECT RELATIONS

17

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and it promotes, even demands thinking, rather than forecloses it. I'm
going to be on a panel at the American Psychoanalytic Association in
January [2011], on concepts of Freud's that are no longer useful theoretically or in clinical work; the panel is part of the American's celebration of
its 100th anniversary. I think that that's a terrific conversation to have,
and one that would have been unimaginable 15 or even 10 years ago.
These conversations are just the kind of thing that Steve and I hoped that
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory would facilitate, and it moves
me deeply to imagine that they are a part of the book's legacy.
REFERENCES

Schafer, R. (984). The analytic attitude. London: Karnac.

Spence, S. P. (985). Narrative and historical truth: Meaning and interpretation
in psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Norton.
Jay R. Greenberg, Ph.D, is a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, and is editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

275 Central Park West, #lBB

New York, NY 10024-0035
jayrgreen@aol.com