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Contemporary Psychoanalysis
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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
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JAY R. GREENBERG, Ph.D.
11
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" ses-
sion at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in
Washington, DC, and one of the discussants saw the book as a blessing
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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 cer-
tain amount of dismay within the White Institute. The issues were sim-
ilar here-not everybody was happy about our trying to level the play-
ing field. People at White were dismayed about a couple of different
things, both interesting and illuminating when you think about our his-
tory as an institute and also, more broadly, about the history of psycho-
analysis.
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 main-
stream 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-
REFLECTIONS ON OBJECT RELATIONS 13
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 trans-
ference 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 intersubjec-
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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 psy-
choanalytic 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 intoler-
ance; 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 la-
ment 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 commu-
nication among these points of view than I would wish for.
But this is also changing. There is an increasing openness to alterna-
tives and it happened because of a number of different developments;
too many ways to go into today, although certainly the quality of psycho-
analytic 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
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 theoreti-
cally 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
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Jay R. Greenberg, Ph.D, is a training and supervising analyst at the William Alan-
son White Institute, and is editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.