I posted this source on Stopdog's thread: Object-Relations & Self-Psychology: A User-Friendly Primer - Barry Joseph Weber, David L. Downer, David I Downing - Google ƒuƒbƒNƒX

It's the best introductory explanation and how the theory is used therapeutically that I've found for what can be very dense and complicated material. There's also the confusion that there are British and American schools of object relations thought, and they use the same terminology, but with different meanings. It's maddening. But I found these theories resonated most strongly for me because it's a developmental view that uses infant/child developmental psychology as a framework for examining needs and deficits to explain current psychological difficulties.