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At the heart of psychoanalytic tradition, object relations theory reaches back to Sigmund Freud's 1905 essay “The Finding of an Object” and fully exfoliates in the groundbreaking child analysis of Melanie Klein, the developmental psychology of D. W. Winnicott, Hanna Segal's psychoanalytic aesthetics, and advances in queer theory, postcolonial studies, and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Bersani, 1990; Butler, 2020; Eng, 2016; Kristeva, 2004; Mitchell, 1987; Rose, 1998; Sánchez-Pardo, 2003; Sedgwick, 2007; Soto-Crespo, 2001). Increasingly, theorists and clinicians have brought the differing and, at times, contentious methodologies of Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan into productive psychoanalytic dialogue (Allen, 2020; Bernstein 2011; Ireland, 2011; Kirshner, 2011; Luepnitz, 2009; Ruti, 2020; Vanier, 2011). This emerging critical conversation provides fresh avenues for discerning the object's mediation of desire at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the creative fiction of such canonical modernists as Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Patrick McGrath.
Prior to Klein, concern for the primacy and persistence of object relations in psychoanalysis begins with Freud's 1905 essay, which reveals the sexual aims and interests of adulthood to be rooted in the object relations of early childhood. “The finding of an object,” in Freud's formula, “is in fact the refinding of it” (p. 222). Freud came to revise his developmental view of the subject's libidinal organization—influenced, in part, by Klein's clinical conclusions about pre-Oedipal phantasy—and he later emphasized a more spatial and contiguous understanding of sexual stages. By 1933, Freud writes in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
Our attitude to the phases of the organization of the libido has in general shifted a little. Whereas earlier we chiefly emphasized the way in which each of them passed
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