It will no doubt help my readers if I place my psychoanalytic sources in the context of the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna (1895–1982), whose work is described in detail in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography, carried on and expanded the work of classical psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the resolution of the Oedipus complex in the treatment of adult neurosis, into her observations and treatment of young children who had been separated from their parents during World War II. Although she continued to focus her theoretical attention on the oedipal period (187), her insights into the needs of pre-oedipal children laid the groundwork for further research in early child development, including that of John Bowlby, who sees his own work as building on such early studies (1:24). In her Hampstead War Nursery in England, Anna Freud observed the importance for language development and toilet training of an ongoing emotional bond with a mother figure, and consequently decided to organize the children in small groups with a "mother" responsible for each one (Young-Bruehl 252). She had found that when children are separated from their mothers, developmental inhibitions set in and regressions occur, but that "once a stable relationship with a surrogate mother had been established by one of the women at the clinic, the superficial signs of symptomatology disappeared and 'the children began to develop in leaps and bounds'" (Roazen 457). She also found that when the deprived and/or separated children are provided a substitute mother, good object relationships result, aggression becomes bound and its manifestations reduced to normal quantities (Young-Bruehl 322). Anna Freud’s insistence on working with children in the context of their families and her belief in helping the child by encouraging changes in maternal behavior amount to an acknowledgment of the importance of environmental factors in human development.
Although Melanie Klein, the British analyst (1881–1960), differed in many ways from Anna Freud in both the theory and technique of child analysis (Young-Bruehl 160–86), she shared with her rival the emphasis on the importance for development of the child’s interactions with the mother. However, in contrast to Anna Freud, who emphasized the relationship between the child’s inner and outer worlds, Klein, drawing her inferences from her analytic work, focused on the internal world of the small child, which she saw, as Peter Gay expresses it, as "a mass of destructive and anxious fantasies" (468). Klein’s work marks the beginning of the development of object relations theory, an approach to psychoanalysis that focuses on the internalized objects, or images, that are created from the child’s introjection of parental figures. As defined by Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell in their review of the history of the concept in psychoanalytic theory, the term "object relations" refers to "individuals' interactions with external and internal (real and imagined) other people, and to the relationship between their internal and external object worlds" (13-14).
Klein’s ideas are perhaps most clearly summarized by Hanna Segal, in a collection of lectures that comprise her Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. Although most psychoanalysts now question much of Klein’s theory, many have also found that her notion of the "depressive position," which she believed occurred during the second half of the first year of life, illuminates the difficulty of the young child’s acceptance of the fact that the mother is a person apart from itself. In Klein’s view, the beginning of the depressive position is marked by the recognition of the mother as a whole person (viii–ix). At that time, the infant experiences feelings of "mourning and pining for the good object felt as lost and destroyed, and guilt. . . which arises from the sense that he has lost the good object through his own destructiveness" (70). Klein believed that this experience of depression "mobilizes in the infant the wish to repair his destroyed object or objects" (72), and that "its working through is accompanied by a radical alteration in his view of reality. . . . The infant becomes aware of himself and of his objects as separate from himself" (73). Klein’s theory thus establishes the connection between mourning and development–a connection currently under more thorough investigation by such contemporaries as the American psychiatrist George H. Pollock, who recently published his two-volume work on what he calls The Mourning-Liberation Process.
Unlike Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, who began their careers as teachers, Margaret S. Mahler (1897-1985) began hers as a pediatrician, although she knew from the outset that she also wanted to pursue her interest in psychoanalysis. Following her emigration from Vienna to the United States (via London) in 1938, her professional interest gradually shifted from her research and therapeutic work in childhood psychosis to her research in what she called the "separation-individuation process" in normal children. As she expresses it in her Memoirs,"For me, the general problem of identity, and especially the way in which one arrives at a sense of self, has always been primary," because of her belief that "it is only out of such knowledge [of the processes of normal development] that we can formulate those strategies of primary prevention and early intervention that hold out the greatest hope for humankind" (136-37). As Paul Stepansky observes in his "Introduction" to her memoirs, Mahler is now "widely regarded as one of the outstanding students of early childhood development of our century" (xiii). Stepansky goes on to define the separation-individuation process as "the series of stages marking the infant’s gradual intrapsychic 'separation' from the mother and correlative understanding of himself as a distinct individual in a world composed of other equally distinct individuals–as an individual, that is, with a subjectively felt sense of identity" (xvii). Mahler explains in her best known work, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, that whereas separation-individuation is an intrapsychic process, her research, which was based on observations of the behavior of mothers with their young children, was guided by the conviction that "this process could be inferred from behaviors that were indeed observable" (23).
Mahler emphasizes that she uses the term "separation" to refer to "the sense of being a separate individual, and not the fact of being physically separated [or emotionally isolated] from someone" (Birth 9). Yet much confusion has resulted from others' misunderstanding of her use of the word. To put it in terms of object relations theory, Mahler’s "separation" refers to the essential (for the development of a sense of identity) human intrapsychic process of separation of self-image from parent images. To present human development in such terms is not to deny the need for human attachment throughout life–a need justifiably stressed by the "attachment theorists." On the contrary, Mahler herself stresses that separation-individuation is a precondition for what she calls "true object relationship" (6). The view that attachment theory and the theory of separation-individuation are antithetical, as articulated for example by Daniel Stern in The Interpersonal World of the Infant(240-42), is, I believe, based on a misunderstanding of Mahler’s intent. Indeed, what Mahler and the attachment theorists have in common is their understanding of the young child’s development as necessarily occurring in relation to the people in his/her environment.
In contrast to Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Margaret S. Mahler, whose work was focused on child development, Otto F. Kernberg, an American professor of psychiatry and training analyst, bases his theoretical formulations on his extensive experience with severely disturbed adult patients. He is probably best known for his classic work, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, which, as he explains in his preface to the book, is the result of "thirteen years' effort to develop a concept of [the psychopathology, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of borderline conditions] in the light of contemporary ego psychology and psychoanalytic object relations theory." As Greenberg and Mitchell explain, Kernberg "derives most of his inferences from the transference reactions characteristically manifested [by such severely disturbed patients]" (328).
Like Mahler, Kernberg sees individual development as necessarily occurring in relation to others in the environment. Emphasizing the importance for the formation of identity of separating self and object images and "integrating libidinally determined and aggressively determined self- and object-images" in the early stages of life (162), Kernberg defines the self as "an intrapsychic structure consisting of multiple self representations and their related affect dispositions." He explains that "the normal self is integrated, in that its component self representations are dynamically organized into a comprehensive whole." This normal integrated self relates to "integrated object representations, that is, to object representations which have incorporated