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BECAUSE THE TERM OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY has been used by different authors in varying contexts and within a wide spectrum of approaches to psychoanalytic theory and technique, I think it may be helpful to start out with my own brief definition.
As I have stated elsewhere (1976a), I conceive of psychoanalytic object relations theory as a special approach or focus within psychoanalysis that examines metapsychological and clinical issues in terms of the vicissitudes of internalized object relations. Object relations theory considers the psychic apparatus as originating in the earliest stage of a process of internalization of object relations. This process covers, roughly speaking, the first three years of life — and results in the formation of substructures of the psychic apparatus that will gradually differentiate. The stages of development of internalized object relations — that is, the stages of infantile autism, symbiosis, separation-individuation, and of object constancy — reflect the vicissitudes of these