The baby at the crossroads

This chapter traces the emergence of new psychoanalytic models and conceptualizations of development, including the Structural Model and Ego Psychology, the Kleinian orientation, and the British Independent group. In the 1920s, Freud’s proposed the “Structural Model,” organized around the three-part mental structure of id, ego, and superego and the resulting psychic conflicts. After Freud’s death in 1940, new controversies emerged, in which competing interpretations of infancy and childhood were central. The Kleinians portrayed a baby in the grip of the most primitive instincts, while the emerging “Ego Psychology” presented a baby with a mixture of drives, needs, and adaptive orientations to care. The Middle Group (later renamed “the Independent Group”) took core ideas from both groups, but maintained the maintaining relational ties to people were as central motivations as sex and aggression and were attentive to forward-moving developmental processes and potentials. Key members such as Winnicott and Bowlby developed a variety of distinctive approaches, with an array of convergences and different pathways of influence.