Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

September 27, 1977. AN EGO-PSYCHOLOGICAL OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY: THE PATHFINDING CONTRIBUTIONS OF EDITH JACOBSON. Otto F. Kernberg, M.D.

Presented on the occasion of the celebration of the eightieth birthday of Dr. Edith Jacobson and the presentation by the New York Psychoanalytic Society to her of its Heinz Hartmann Award, Dr. Kernberg's paper was preceded by congratulatory remarks by Dr. Leo Stone, President of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and by Dr. Burness Moore, President of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

Dr. Kernberg's essential thesis was that Dr. Jacobson's work had developed a complete and comprehensive development and psychostructural model that constituted an integrative object relations theory of great value for the psychoanalytic understanding of the entire spectrum of psychopathology and of normal development. In his exposition of this thesis, Dr. Kernberg examined Dr. Jacobson's contributions to the theories of affect, depression, and object relations. He cited her emphasis that affects should not just be regarded as simple discharge or tension-reducing processes, but rather as the result of over-all drive investments in self and object representations. Similarly, she considered moods as general affective colorings of the entire experience of the self and object world. These insights firmly connected clinical theories of affect to the vicissitudes of self and object relations. In her subsequent investigations, neurotic and psychotic depressions were delineated in terms of the varying relation to the lost object and its intrapsychic representation. Dr. Kernberg felt that these understandings made clear the intimate connection between affect differentiation, the vicissitudes of internalized object relations, and ego and superego differentiation. They provided the foundation for his own understanding of affects as deriving from constitutionally determined pleasurable and unpleasurable affect dispositions which arise in the undiff