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Jay Greenberg, together with his collaborator, Steven Mitchell, first came into national prominence in 1983 when he published Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.1 We can still remember the stir created on the psychoanalytic scene and the curiosity raised in its readers as to which author wrote what part of the joint effort, whose ideas were whose. In that book, two competing models of psychoanalysis were put forward, the drive-structure model and the relational-structure model, the authors categorizing various psychoanalytic contributors as being defined by one or the other of the two. Greenberg and Mitchell identified as well what they termed mixed model theorists who, because of the instability of their views, would drift from the unstable middle to one side or the other. They included in the unstable group both Kohut and Sandler, whose models continued to incorporate both drive and relational features.
What seemed the most helpful and original aspect of that book was its magnificent summary of the history of psychoanalytic ideas and its challenging and heuristically useful organization of these ideas. One can still refer candidates to the book for a wonderfully concise and fair-minded description of the development of Freudian ideas, for a contextual analysis of Klein, Winnicott, Balint, and others of the English school, and for a unique overall summary of Harry Stack Sullivan's views on human interaction. The separation of drive-structure model and relational-structure model proved to be prophetic, with psychoanalysts continuing to this day to line up across the boundary Mitchell and Greenberg defined.
While Mitchell has gone on, in two subsequent volumes, to articulate relational analysis as distinct from drive theory, Greenberg, in the volume under review here, has opted to blur the sharp distinction between the relational-structure model and the drivestructure model that he had originally proposed. Judging by the apparent divergence in the paths Greenber