Otto Kernberg

Like Jacobson and Mahler, I believe drives are intrinsically linked to object interactions and support Freud's dual-drive hypothesis. I suppose libidinal and aggressive drive derivatives invest in object interactions, especially brief symbiotic states driven by peak affect activation, from a young age. I contend that the early stages of drives' ideational and affective representations are indistinguishable, and that the effect states that correspond to the drives' initial manifestations have always been significant links between self- and object representations (Jacobson).

I believe that affects are the fundamental source of motivation and that once internalized or fixed as the frame of one's internalized "good" and "bad" object connections, affects gradually fuse with libidal and aggressive impulses to produce hierarchically superordinate motivational systems. The drives' 'building blocks' ' are basic effects (Kernberg,1990). I think unconscious intrapsychic conflicts always involve opposing or contradictory units of self and object representations, each with its own affect disposition reflecting the defensive structure, and some under the influence of a specific drive derivative (clinically, a certain affect disposition reflecting the instinctual side of the conflict). Impulse and defense are often represented through internalized object associations, rather than being the only causes of unconscious intrapsychic conflict.

Neurotic personalities have well-integrated superego, ego, and id. Resistance analysis triggers the transference of relatively global components of these structures and their internalized object relations in psychoanalysis. Drive derivatives are analyzed with the patient's infantile self's link to main parental objects projected onto the analyst.

Psychic representations of pre-oedipal conflicts and oedipal phase representations predominate in borderline personality organization. Conflicts are mutually distinct ego states that defend basic dissociation or splitting, not suppressed and unconscious dynamic. The transference displays the activation of primitive object relations that predate the consolidation of the ego, superego, and id as confusing affect states, which needs to be assessed in three steps: first, clarification of a dominant primitive object relation in the transference, with its corresponding self and object representation and the dominant affect connecting them; second, analysis of the alternative projection of self and object representation; and third. Part-object links can become complete object relations through analysis, and fundamental transferences—which mostly describe Mahler's growth prior to object constancy—can become mature oedipal transferences. Exploration of the analyst's countertransference, including concordant and complementary identifications (Racker, 1957), helps transference analysis and strengthens the patient's ego.

I've also written about how the pathological grandiose self of narcissistic personalities is resolved in transference as its component part-object relationships are clarified and the corresponding dominant primitive defensive operations are interpreted (1975, 1984) and how this process occurs over time.My approach may be considered an attempt to integrate several object relations theories within an ego psychology-object relations theory model insofar as I have drawn on findings regarding primitive defenses and object relations from the Kleinian school, Fairbairn's ideas about the essential dyadic structures involving self representation-object representation-affect, and Jacobson's and Mahler's theoretical frames.

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