Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

October 15, 1974. INSTINCTS, AFFECTS AND OBJECT RELATIONS. Otto Kernberg, M.D.

Dr. Kernberg related current thinking in psychoanalysis to other fields such as ethology, neurophysiology, psychophysiology of affect, and general learning theory. Using systems thinking, particularly that concerned with boundary interactions, he proposed that internalized object relations be considered 'units'. Such units include self-images and object-images and are subsystems integrated by organizations at the next order in the hierarchy which are psychologically oriented drives and psychic structures (ego, id, superego). In turn, these superordinate systems are components of the personality at large which is the supersystem for this model. On the other end of the hierarchy, the units of object relations consolidate more fundamental subsystems such as inborn behavior patterns, affect dispositions, neurovegetative discharge patterns, and nonspecific arousal mechanisms.

In a developmental framework, ethology and neurophysiology consider instincts as organizations of behavior centered around drive systems determined not by a simple chain-like organization of organismic changes resulting from specific external stimuli, but in their very organization determined by the integration of experience. Instincts change through learning, from primitive inborn patterns into flexible over-all plans. In the human, such inborn patterns determine early attachment and affect dispositions (mediated by neurophysiologically identified 'reward' and 'punishment' neural systems). In earliest development, affect dispositions of the units of internalized object relations carry out a major organizing function through which 'all good' object representations are separated from those that are 'all bad'. Further, these two affect-determined series of units, one pleasurable and one unpleasurable, evolve into libidinally and aggressively invested constellations of psychic drive systems. This is a reformulation