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PARTISAN REVIEW
depressive posi tion, the earlies t mother/child empathic interactive failures
and early archaic fantasy.
But now to continue: In 1920, with the First World War, Freud,
plagued by man's destructiveness, added his concept of the aggressive or
Death Instinct to his armamentarium, explaining aggression and
masochism, and supplying energy to the criticaJ agency with the ego-the
later superego. By 1923 and 1926, dissatisfied wi th the cleavage line of
conflict between conscious and unconscious, Freud rearranged his model
into a new tripartite model, the id, ego, and superego of the structuraJ the–
ory; the conflict now falling between these agencies and their functions, all
moderated by the ego. It became clear that the ego, reali ty and adaptation
had been neglected in the interest of the instincts, and Freud's followers in
the thirties now laid increasing stress on the ego in what became known as
Ego Psychology. Anna Freud elaborated on the defensive functions of the
ego, W Reich on character, H . Hartman on the autonomous functions and
adaptive functions of the ego, and Piaget-not an anaJyst-elaborating on
the development of cogni tion. The ego now had energies, anxiety signaJs,
and motivations of its own and its development was studied in terms of
defensive, autonomous, adaptive, and integrative functions, and its role in
internal and external object relations. With the Second World War, Anna
Freud (and her father) moved to England and Hartman to America where
they continued their ego psychologicaJ work. By the fifties it became
apparent that not enough was known about earlier pre-oedipal develop–
ment. Child observations added new knowledge about the importance and
vicissitudes of mother/ child interactions. At the same time, an attempt to
apply psychoanaJytic techniques to more primi tive pathologies-the
"widening scope of psychoanalysis" described by Leo Stone in America
and Rosenfeld in England-also pointed to a need to understand early
object relations, that is relations between the self and others, externaJly
interpersonally and their internal intrapsychic representation. Edith
Jacobson focused on depression to study the self and the object world in
the fifties, while Margaret Mahler in the sixties first focused on autism and
symbiotic psychosis in children then studied normaJ mother/child interac–
tion in her nursery, formulating her sequence of separation-individuation,
constituting the beginning of object relations theory in America.
In the meantime in England in the thirties, Melanie Klein, a child ana–
lyst working with psychotic children, and taking off from Freud's
destructive instinct, had founded her school of British object relations
sometimes referred to as an "id mythology," in which fantasies of primi–
tive aggression and primitive defenses against aggression-such as
projective identification and splitting-play the major role in psychic
development. Klein's theories (elaborated by Fairbairn, Rosenfeld,
Winnicott and Bion) , while popular in England and Latin America,
