The Battering Parent and his Child: A Study in Early Object Relations

Kernberg (1970) defines object relations theory as the 'psychoanalytic approach to the [study of] internalization of interpersonal relations, the study of how interpersonal relations determine intrapsychic structures and how intrapsychic structures preserve, modify and reactivate past internalized relations … in the context of present interpersonal relations.' It is evident that this definition implies a great deal of what psychoanalysis has been concerned with from its very inception. In his post-script to the Dora case, for example, Freud (1905) characterizes transferences as 'new editions or facsimilies of the impulses and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis, … [which] have this peculiarity … that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician'. Nonetheless it remains the case that interest in the genesis of object relations has only in recent years come into the main stream of psychoanalytic investigation. In his brief historical review, Kernberg (1970) suggests that this development can be regarded as stemming from the development of the structural theory. The shift of emphasis from a topographic point of view, which tended to take character and adaptive style for granted while focusing on mechanisms of symptom formation, to concern with the genesis of character and personality as such seems to have been a necessary precondition for the development of interest in object relations.

It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the pioneering work in the field has been done either by analysts working with very young individuals in whom the incompleteness of the process of structure formation forced attention to the role of early relations, or by people particularly interested in psychotic and near psychotic individuals in whom the incompleteness or distortions of the ultimate psychic structure also focused attention on the problems of the genesis of object relations.

As is so frequently the case