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The history of the development of psychoanalytic ideas can provide interesting, sometimes fascinating reading. In this book, the authors undertake a review of psychoanalytic ideas from the earliest beginnings in Freud to the present day. They organize their "guide" to theory development around two major models: the drive/structure and the relational/structure models. The drive/structure model refers to "the original Freudian model, which takes as its starting point the instinctual drives" (p. 20). The relational/structure model is described as follows: "The … more radical strategy for dealing with object relations has been to replace the drive theory model with a fundamentally different conceptual framework in which relations with others constitute the fundamental building blocks of mental life" (p. 3). The authors refer to it further as "an alternative comprehensive model initiated in the work of Fairbairn and Sullivan, which evolves structure solely from the individual's relations with other people" (p. 20).
The title of the book refers to the authors' attempt to describe how psychoanalytic theorists have tried to deal with the obvious importance of human relationships in human development. They believe that it is the "problem" in psychoanalytic theory of accounting for the significance of man as a social animal that has spawned the newer relational/structure model.
Freud's first explanation of the development of neuroses, in terms of trauma that is repressed, followed by the development of symptoms, is considered a relational model by the authors. This is because in Freud's first theory of neurosis the traumatic experiences basically involve relationships with others. They point out how different this model is from Freud's subsequent one, in which he postulated that human motivation is a biological given organized around libidinal and aggressive instinctual drives.
The authors suggest that many psychoanalytic theorists, including