 The concept of what Rosenfeld termed "narcissistic omnipotent object relations" - 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

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, 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.