You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalytic theorists who trace the roots of their ideas are much like those of us who research our genealogies in quest of distinguished ancestors, hoping not to encounter disreputable connections en route and perhaps even trying to deny that any might exist. Most analysts tend to forget, repress, or deny the existence of theoretically fruitful but politically unacceptable forebears at the same time that they are ready and eager to claim as ideational ancestors Freud and his acknowledged disciples and successors.
While I do not mean to suggest any correlation between the quality or importance of a person's work and his or her sociopolitical status within the psychoanalytic movement, it is not uncommon that at least some of the contributions of these politically disreputable or illegitimate analytic ancestors, for example, Ferenczi, Rank, Tausk, Reich, Horney, Alexander, and to a lesser extent Klein and Fairbairn, may undergo decades of neglect and suppression only to reenter and enrich the corpus of legitimate theory cloaked as more or less “original” contributions of more “acceptable” analysts from a newer generation.
An example of this phenomenon is encountered in tracing the roots of two of the important and apparently trail-breaking theorists of our time, Kernberg and Kohut. In I pointed out that Kernberg's basic ideas bear a powerful resemblance to those of Melanie Klein, although he manifestly disagrees with most of her theory. Curiously, in relation to the subject of this paper, Kernberg does acknowledge a theoretical debt to Fairbairn with regard to his concept of developmental building blocks or internal object relations units (representations consisting of part self, part object, and linking affect). But, as Rubens (1984) notes, Kernberg's use of conventional drive and structural theory makes his definition of these units so fundamentally different from Fairbairn's that the claim of familial linkage is moot.
I have also noted the almost uncanny resemblan