Homeostasis and Attachment: An Integration of Classical and Object Relational Approaches to the Good-Enough Mother

We live in the best of times and the worst of times-in the best of times because of the burgeoning of psychological knowledge and in the worst of times because of the undermining of psychological supports to individual identity. In the last 20 years, psychoanalytic retrospective investigation has suggested new models for comprehension of preoedipal disorders, and in the last 10 years psychoanalytically inspired developmental research has confirmed and enriched child psychoanalytic models of the antecedents of normality and pathology. Just as medicine has discovered new diseases as well as new cures and has enlarged the definition of health, psychoanalytic investigation has extended our knowledge of the determinants of psychological wellness and its antecedents. Coincident with this enhanced knowledge is the fragmentation of the family, the trend toward multiple caretakers in early life with a waning of the quality of adult-child interaction, and a host of related factors which, in the aggregate, suggest an enormous growth in the incidence and depth of preoedipal disorders, along with a greatly increased toll in human happiness and productivity.

I wear two hats: I spent approximately half my career as a child development researcher and another half as a practicing psychoanalyst. I experience the mental skills involved in these disciplines as radically different. Research skills require a capacity for unambiguous operationalization of constructs, logical incisiveness, and reliance upon a certain corpus of technical approaches to data analysis. Psychoanalytic skills involve a capacity for empathy, intuition, and imaginative construction based on the most varied information and impressions. In this connection, I am reminded of a