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HISTORY Freud developed the concept Object Relation to describe or emphasize that bodily ). Thus, the objects can be receivers of both Love and Hate , the affective effects of the Libido and the death drive. Until the 1970s, however, few American psychoanalysts were influenced by the school of Melanie Klein , on the one hand, who constituted an opposite polarity to the school of Anna Freud (which dominated American psychoanalysis in 1940s , 1950s , and 1960s and was represented in the US by Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Rapaport, Erikson, Jacobson, and Mahler), and, on the other hand, the "middle group" who fell between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and was influenced by the British schools of Michael Balint , Donald Winnicott , and Ronald Fairbairn . The strong animosity in England between the school of Anna Freud and that of Melanie Klein was transplanted to the US, where the Anna Freud group dominated totally until the 1970s , when new interpersonal psychoanalysis arose partly from ideas of culturalist psychoanalysis, influenced also by Ego Psychology , and partly by British theories which have also entered under the broad terminology of "British object relations theories". Recent decades in developmental psychological research, for example on the onset of a " Theory Of Mind " in children, has suggested that the formation of mental world is enabled by the infant-parent interpersonal interaction which was the main thesis of British object-relations tradition (e.g. Fairbairn, 1952). Fairbairn also discovered the psychological condition of dysfunctional interpersonal attachment of abused children to their abusing parents, which is now explained by Stockholm Syndrome as genetically programed neurobiological psychological response to a situation where the victim perceives her or his life (acutely or chronically) depends on their captor's good will. SOURCES Fairbairn, W. R. D., (1952). An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. New York: Basic Books. Fairbairn, W. R. D., (1952). Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object relationships, London. SEE ALSO |
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