Rosenfeld made seminal contributions to Kleinian thinking on psychotic and other very ill patients;[1] while his emphasis on the role of the analyst in contributing to potential impasses in the analytic encounter has had a wide impact on analysts both in Britain and internationally.
[8] The concept of what Rosenfeld termed "narcissistic omnipotent object relations"[9] - a state of mind dominated by an internal object merging ego and ego ideal in a form of mad omnipotence - was later to feed into Kernberg's notion of the pathologically grandiose self[10] Rosenfeld's final work, Impasse and Interpretation (1987), focused on the possibility of the overcoming of critical moments of impasse with difficult patients.
Rosenfeld was increasingly convinced that such potentially destructive impasses were predicated on the existence of blind spots in the analyst,[11] thus pointing the way for the later developments of intersubjective psychoanalysis.
While for some analysts, the negative therapeutic reaction is an insurmountable block, Rosenfeld attempts to show that these "dead ends" are moments that can and should be overcome.
Using the concept of envy to shed light on analytic impasse, Rosenfeld maintained that while patients may in some ways prefer to resist change rather than allow the analyst to help them,[12] if handled innovatively, such stalemates may allow patients to bring back to life for their analyst the impasses they subjectively lived at key moments in their development.