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Is modern psychoanalysis only a theory of technique? In a critique and defense of modern psychoanalysis, the author describes what he views as the primary epistemological difficulties in modern psychoanalytic theory, vis-a-vis the greater psychoanalytic community, that may be contributing to an “existential crisis” in its theory and theorists. Drawing from the work of other psychoanalytic traditions, the author argues that far from being just a theory of technique and, therefore, lacking as far as mind theory, modern psychoanalysis is embedded in traditional and contemporary theory, theoretical introjects of a sort, whether this is formally recognized or not. For example, the author describes how, in his view, Spotnitz and Meadow's conception of the development and workings of the early infantile psyche and of pathology can be alternatively understood as a theory of internal object relations, indeed, that a theory of
internal object relations is implicit in their work. From this perspective, the author attempts to clarify what in modern analytic literature could be described as the “killing off” or the “death” of the object in narcissism and, more specifically, schizophrenia and concludes that in both of these states the object is never truly dead.