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Medical Director, The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Westchester Division; Professor of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College; Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Presented at the panel on "The Relationship Between Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique" at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Boston, May, 1982.
THE PRINCIPAL AIM OF THIS PAPER is to integrate new knowledge regarding the structural characteristics of and the psychoanalytic approach to severe character pathologies with Fenichel's (1941) theory of psychoanalytic technique. Within his proposals of metapsychological criteria for interpretation, Fenichel both incorporated and critically revised Reich's (1936) technical approach to character resistances. My expansion of Fenichel's theory of psychoanalytic technique as it applies to character analysis is in line with my earlier efforts to enrich an ego-psychological approach to technique with object relations theory (see Kernberg, 1980, Chapt. 9).
According to object relations theory, unconscious intrapsychic conflicts are not simply conflicts between impulse and defense. These conflicts are between two opposing units or sets of internalized object relations. Each of these units consists of a self- and an object representation under the impact of a drive derivative (clinically, an affect disposition). Both impulse and