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This paper summarizes my efforts to develop a contemporary psychoanalytic theory of drives, integrating this theory with contemporary affect theory and with psychoanalytic object relations theory. It proposes, in essence, that affects are the primary motivations of behavior, that they include a fundamental communicative function in the infant/caregiver relationship, and that it is the integration of, respectively, positive and negative affects that will crystallize libido and aggression as supra-ordinate motivational systems or drives. At the same time, insofar as peak affect states organize the internalization of the relationship between self and objects in the form of affect-invested self and object representations, affects are also contributing fundamentally to the organization of an internalized world of object relations, eventually consolidated in the tripartite structure of the mind.
This proposed interrelationship of affects, self- and object representations, and drives rejects the assumption of
Dr. Kernberg is Director. Personality Disorders Institute, The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Westchester Division; Professor of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College; and Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
This article was presented at the Third International Conference on Research in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis of Childhood, Metz, France, September 29-October 1, 1995.
incompatibility of drive theory and object relations theory and provides potential bridging functions with the neurobiology of affects.