Freud's metapsychology was in essence a theory of drives, in that it invoked the concepts of energy and structure to show that every human action has its basis in a fundamental and irreducible instinctual ground. Two drives were pre-eminent: the sexual drive and the drive for selfpreservation. Connected with the concept of drive was the notion of an object – the psychic economy was populated by a plethora of such objects, with the objects in question being related to the ‘discharge’ of an underlying drive. Indeed, Freud himself was not always clear or consistent on the relation between drive and object, and changed his position in subsequent writings or sometimes said incompatible things about objects in different parts of the same text. Across this inconsistency, the fundamental point remained: the psychic object is a result of the drive, and the relation to an object is the function of a drive's discharge. For example, the child's relation to the breast – trusting, untrusting, and so on – serves as a prototype for its subsequent relations to whole objects, such as mother and father.

The child's body, then, is a vehicle for drives, though the relatively unstructured character of the drives ensures they are polymorphous in nature. ‘Successful’ psychic development is then construed by Freud and his followers as the capacity of the individual psyche to form relations with whole objects. Subsequent thinkers in the psychoanalytical tradition such as Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm and Karen Horney criticised this emphasis on the individual psyche, and charged Freud with de-emphasising social relations and group ties, despite his attempts to deal with a range of these issues in such works as Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. Freud was said to have failed to consider adequately the mechanisms that link objects to drives and objects to each other (see, for instance, the work of Klein and Winnicott discussed below). These mechanisms – introjection and projection – are highly flexible in their operation, and blend objects with each other, as well as decompose objects into partial or part objects. Object creation can also be enhanced by the particular dealings an individual has with the external world.