دانلود کتاب راهنمای نظریه روابط ابژه – مفاهیم کلیدی در روانکاوی معاصر

I believe that the most important development in the history of psychoanalytic science has been the crystallization of contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory. Freud’s original model of unconscious intrapsychic conflicts as the origin of neurotic illness and pathological character formation conceived of such conflicts as developing between aggression (death drive) and libido as internal drives, and defensive mechanisms directed against them. Libidinal and aggressive drives, originating in the Id, were the original motivating systems, reflecting the body’s demands on the psychic apparatus. Defenses were the Ego’s realistic efforts to control under the influence of the Superego. Contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory proposes, in contrast, that the primary motivation of psychic functioning derives from genetically determined, inborn affective systems, representing the demands of the body in psychic experience and behavior. These primary affects motivate the infant’s engagement with the mothering other, and are internalized as intrapsychic dyadic units, each of them constituted by the representation of self and the representation of the significant other (“object”), framed by the corresponding affect of their interaction. Thus, the real drives are the affects, first expressed as basic biological needs, and then internalized as affectively invested units of self and object representations. As the personality matures, these dyadic units are integrated into evolving structures that gradually consolidate an integrated self in the context of integrated representations of significant others, the internal world of object relations. Libidinal affects: attachment, eroticism, and affiliative playbonding, jointly establish an idealized segment of self/other experience, while interactions with an aggressive valence, dominated by rage and fight, fear and _light, and separation panic, constitute a dangerous, persecutory segment of experience. Typical psychological development leads to gradual integration of the idealized and persecutory segments of mental experience and behavior, resulting in a mature, nuanced, and stable identity (self) able to experience others as equally complex and separate. Failure to achieve this integration due to excessive dominance of aggression and negative affects maintains the split of idealized and persecutory segments resulting in personality organization at the borderline level. Here intrapsychic conflicts emerge under the control of splitting operations and related primitive defensive mechanisms. In contrast, when integration has taken place, repression and compromise formation replaces splitting as a major way to deal with conflicts between love and aggression, and unconscious intrapsychic conflicts between idealized and persecutory internalized object relations. A major conceptual controversy now emerges. Conflicts are conceived now as not between “pure” affects, but between affectively invested internalized object relations. Both the impulsive side and the defensive side of intrapsychic conflicts are constituted by dyadic units of internalized, affective positive and negative object relations. Freud’s libido and aggressive drives thus seem, indeed, to characterize unconscious conflicts between condensed conglomerates of constituent positive or negative affects. Thus, at a higher level of advanced intrapsychic conflicts, the characterization of conflicts as involving the overall “drives” of libido and aggression still seems valid, although these are highly individualized and complex motivational forces. At the beginning of life, however, very early conflicts are clearly dominated by contradictory affects, actual drives close to their direct neurobiological basis. How then shall we call Freud’s complex drives in contrast to their biologically constituent primary motivational affect systems? This, I believe, is an open question. In the present volume, a comprehensive, clear, and fascinating description of the history of contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory, the reader will find the discovery of the elements of this theory, the various theoretical and technical developments that these findings have originated, and the alternative formulations of object relations theory they have produced. Several authors assert that the affects are the drives, and that we should abandon Freud’s dual drive theory; others would keep Freud’s concept of libido only, and relate it to one or other affect system. Yet, other authors still would argue for keeping psychoanalysis and the dual drive theory as a field of the “subjective,” not directly linked to any other “objective” scientific field. My personal view, I hope, has already been stated: I see libido and aggression (not the death drive) as overall, hierarchically supraordinate motivational systems that integrate affect systems into a positive and a negative constellation, relevant at a higher level of psychological development than at the original developmental stage of the infant where affects practically dominate motivation by themselves and may be thought of as drives. Affects are the drives if we follow the original definition of drives as the “demands from the body.” Human beings have incorporated primary affects into developmentally derived, variously structured internalized object relations, and these internalized object relations become the motors of our complex personality structures and interactions, normal or pathological.