Shifting Paradigms in Psychoanalysis since the 1940s

Abstract

The British School of Psychoanalysis is characterised in both its major subtraditions (the Kleinian and Independent) by an emphasis on the inner world of the infant in the earliest phases of life. The shift from a model of instinctual drives to one of 'internal worlds', in which phantasies of the parents or fragmented parts of the parents are constructed in a phenomenology of the unconscious, was one significant development of Freud's ideas. A second change of emphasis from the classical view was the emphasis given to pre-Oedipal development, focussed primarily on the infant's relation with the mother, and the attempt to theorise primitive states of mind located at this early stage. These ideas were formulated through the development of child analysis, by Melanie Klein and later many others including the most prominent Independent analyst, Donald Winnicott. This framework gave understanding of the roots of psychotic states of mind found in adults, and thus provided the basis for their analytic treatment. This body of ideas is sometimes referred to as 'object-relations' theory, though it is doubtful if the dry associations of that term are very helpful in characterising its emotionally charged and dramatic view of the unconscious mind. These two books provide ways of getting to grips with the concerns of two components of this broad tradition. The first has the work of the Independents or