Growing interest in the contribution of early object relations (Kernberg, 1975, 1976; Mahler, 1960) to complex psychological phenomena which had heretofore been viewed in exclusively structural and economic terms has prompted and permitted the rethinking and recasting of core psychoanalytic concepts and formulations. For example, in a recent paper (Lerner and Lerner, 1982) the authors presented empirical data which strongly supported a reformulation of the concept of defense. Based on the proposition that defensive and representational functions are extricably related, a developmental-structural model of defense conceptualized within an object-representational framework was presented.