Factors in the Development of the Sense of the Object

IT CAN BE ARGUED I believe, that all psychoanalytic theories are object relations theories. The observation that pointed to a specifically psychoanalytic theory of object relations was Freud's recognition of the existence of transference—the hitherto undiscovered fact that a human being under certain structured circumstances "transfers" to a person in his current life whole attitudes derived from significant past experiences, whole relationships preserved outside conscious awareness in a more or less unaltered state. However, to accept the argument that the early theories of id psychology and the later theories derived from the structural hypothesis are object relations theories would fail to consider that, while all psychoanalytic theories work with the data gained from human interrelatedness, they do not all address the same questions. I greatly oversimplify when I say that one of Freud's most significant questions was to ask in what way the motive power, "the driving force—il primo motore—behind all human activity" (1910, p. 74) is to be conceptualized. And that