You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Winston Churchill once stated that the United States and Great Britain were two great democracies divided by a common language. This aphorism applies generally to the idiosyncrasies of the geopolitics of psychoanalytic practice worldwide, but it has specific cogency to the comparisons between Great Britain and the United States. Not only is the term “object relations” employed somewhat differently in Great Britain, but even such a concept as “projective identification” seems to have undergone a “sea change” and begun to convey meanings far afield from Klein's original hypothesis. Leaders in American ego psychology, following in the footsteps of others overseas, began to conceive of object relations from the standpoint of the representational world and arrived, consequently, at an object relations theory which is at some variance from both British schools. (It must be remembered that, while Klein dealt with “internal objects,” the Independents really constitute the British Object Relations School; each of their concepts of objects differs from one another along many lines.) What I am referring to are the critical differences between Klein's “internal objects,”