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John Steiner is one of the key figures in the London Kleinian group. Roy Schafer (1997), in a recent tribute, referred to them as the Kleinian Freudians. He praised them for their rigour, their respect for the fundamental importance of psychic reality, and the unconscious operation of instinctual forces, the emphasis on transference in its totality, and, of course, on countertransference—the indispensable means by which the deeper layers of archaic relationships, activated unconsciously in both patient and analyst, may be explored.
Steiner's work on the theme of “turning the blind eye” in the Oedipus myth (Steiner 1985), which foreshadowed some of the ideas in the present paper, together with his book, Psychic Retreats (Steiner 1993) and his 1996 paper, “The Aim of Psychoanalysis,” are essential reading for the modern psychoanalyst. In these works one can trace the development of Klein's and Bion's work through the contributions of Segal (1957), Rosenfeld (1983), Meltzer (1973), Joseph (1985), and Steiner himself to the “two-person,” relational systems model that his current thinking represents.
This paper on the themes of power and dominance in the Oedipal situation is both a striking example of modern Kleinian thinking and also a new opportunity to explore the oldest question confronting the Freudian analyst: What are the effects of struggles for dominance in the mother-infant and mother-child situation on the form and intensity of the Oedipus complex?
First, there has been a very significant shift in the Kleinian theory of “positions” articulated by the London group over the past decade or two, and this shift is well documented in this paper. This refers to the