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TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY usually emphasize the way in which crude sexual and aggressive impulses attempt to force their way towards the surface of the mind, to find expression in the individual's subjective experience and overt behaviour. On the path from the depths to the surface such impulses may be felt to be dangerous, may arouse conflict in the mind and have to be defended against or censored, distorted so that their true meaning is hidden from the person's own consciousness. Although such defensive distortion and censorship is a normal process, a consequence of the child's progressive socialization, the outcome of conflict and defence may under certain circumstances be regarded as pathological.
Within the traditional theoretical framework of psychoanalysis the persons towards whom the impulses are directed, either in fantasy or reality, are the objects of the drives—hence, of course, the term object relationships. Such object relationships have been accounted for in classical psychoanalytic theory in terms of the investment of the object (or its mental representation) with instinctual drive energy, either in its original crude state or in a neutralized, purified or sublimated form.
In contrast to the linking of psychopathology with conflict over primitive instinctual impulses, there has been an increasing tendency over the past few decades to describe and explain both normal and pathological processes in terms of the vicissitudes of the individual's object relationships. The viewing of psychological processes from the vantage point of object relations (and, in particular, early object relations) has often been contrasted with that view which stresses unconscious wish-fulfilment, and indeed violent