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THE TERM OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY sometimes puzzles the clinician. In his daily work the psychoanalyst might be quite content to rely on Brenner's (1955) disarmingly clear statement: "In psychoanalytic literature the term 'object' is used to designate persons or things of the external environment which are psychologically significant to one's psychic life, whether such 'things' be animate or lifeless. Likewise the phrase 'object relations' refers to the individual's attitude and behavior toward such objects" (p. 112).
But when the clinician attends to theoreticians and developmental observers, he discovers no single theory at all; he finds, instead, a variety of competing theories, explicitly or implicitly defined in different ways. Nevertheless, as Kanzer (Panel, 1978) reminded us, "object relations theory" has come to be associated with some notions, at least, of interest to clinicians. Aside from formulations by Kleinian psychoanalysts, "neo-Freudian" analysts, and nonanalysts, various writers have associated the subject with the manifestations of narcissism (and the ever-evanescent "self"), the viscissitudes