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Training and Supervising Analyst, Adult and Child, Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute; Professor of Child Psychiatry, Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Presented at the Panel on "The Technical Consequences of Object Relations Theory" at the Fall Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, December 17, 1978.
I wish to express my thanks to Margaret Mahler, M.D., and Henri Parens, M.D., for their careful reading and most helpful suggestions.
THE SIGNIFICANCE AND APPLICATION of separation-individuation theory should be considered in the light of its place in the history of psychoanalytic developmental psychology. The use of the two main sources of developmental concepts — reconstruction from psychoanalysis of adults and direct observations of infants and young children — was exemplified by Freud, as Blum (1977) so elegantly described. Freud's reconstructions in his self-analysis and from the analyses of patients, as well as his formulations derived from observations of his grandchildren are, as Blum says, "the prototype of preoedipal reconstruction."
Abraham's (1924) outline of stages of object love, also from the analysis of adults, corresponds significantly to modern formulations of infantile development (Parens and Saul, 1971, p. 62n). And Wilhelm Reich's work on character (1933-1934) also added to knowledge of preoedipal development and its vicissitudes. The structural theory, Hartmann's