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Albert Solnit explained that this was the first in a series of three panels to be jointly sponsored by the Association for Child Psychoanalysis and the American Psychoanalytic Association. The next panel—Adolescence and Maturity—is planned for the Annual Meeting in Dallas, 1972; the final panel, planned for the Fall Meeting in New York, 1972, will discuss Maturity, Senescence and Sociological Implications.
The study of object relations has been a focus of psychoanalytic attention for many years, and Solnit emphasized that Margaret Mahler's contributions have opened new horizons for the study of normal as well as pathological processes; they have led to an understanding that empathy and tenderness as a goal can be experienced by an individual in a human relationship only after he has achieved a necessary degree of separateness.
Margaret Mahler's paper, "On the First Three Phases of the Separation-Individuation Process," summed up a 12- to 15-year study of the normal separation-individuation process. This work focused on the examination of phenomena entailed in two Freudian concepts: (1) that the human being is at first absolutely and remains later on relatively dependent on a mother; (2) as a result, object relationship, i.e., one person's endowing another with object libido, is the most reliable single factor by which we are able to determine, on the one hand, the level of mental health and, on the other, the extent of the therapeutic potential.