The Use of the Object in Psychoanalysis
The Use of the Object in Psychoanalysis

Author: David E. Scharff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 0429581459

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Using Winnicott’s classic paper as its starting point, this fascinating collection explores a range of clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic perspectives around relating to "the object." Each author approaches the topic from a different angle, switching among the patient’s use of others in their internal and external lives, their use of their therapist, and the therapist’s own use of their patients. The use of objects is susceptible to wide interpretation and elaboration; it is both a normal phenomenon and a marker for certain personal difficulties, or even psychopathologies, seen in clinical practice. While it is normal for people to relate to others through the lens of their internal objects in ways that give added meaning to aspects of their lives, it becomes problematic when people live as if devoid of a self and instead live almost exclusively through the others who form their internal worlds, often leading them to feel that they cannot be happy until and unless others change. Assessing the significance of objects among adult and child patients, groups and the group-as-object, and exploring Freud’s own use of objects, The Use of the Object in Psychoanalysis will be of significant interest both to experienced psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and to trainees exploring important theoretical questions.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

Author: Jay R. Greenberg

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-12-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0674417003

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

Body as Psychoanalytic Object
Body as Psychoanalytic Object

Author: Caron Harrang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-19

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 100042362X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book! This book explores the role of bodily phenomena in mental life and in the psychoanalytic encounter, encouraging further dialog within psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the humanities, and contributing new clinical and theoretical perspectives to the recent resurgence of psychoanalytic interest in the body. Presented in six parts in which diverse meanings are explored, Body as Psychoanalytic Object focuses on the clinical psychoanalytic encounter and the body as object of psychoanalytic inquiry, spanning from the prenatal experience to death. The contributors explore key themes including mind–body relations in Winnicott, Bion, and beyond; oneiric body; nascent body in early object relations; body and psychosensory experience; body in breakdown; and body in virtual space. With clinical vignettes throughout, each chapter provides unique insight into how different analysts work with bodily phenomena in the clinical situation and how it is conceived theoretically. Building on the thinking of Winnicott and Bion, as well as contributions from French psychoanalysis, Body as Psychoanalytic Object offers a way forward in a body-based understanding of object relations theory for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Essential Papers on Object Relations
Essential Papers on Object Relations

Author: Peter Buckley

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1986-05

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 0814710808

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Psychoanalysis and Woman collects for the first time in one volume the most important psychoanalytic writings on female sexuality and women from Freud's contemporaries through French feminisms to postmodernism and post-feminism. These primary texts introduce the reader to a broad spectrum of works by primarily women theorists writing within a number of different psychoanalytic traditions.Psychoanalysis and Woman makes available a number of fundamental, yet obscure and inaccessible early psychoanalytic documents by women and places them within the context of later women psychoanalytic theorists. Editor Shelley Saguaro provides a concise contextual introduction addressing some of the sexual political issues raised by psychoanalysis, while each section of the volume is prefaced with more specific biographical and cultural introductory material. Topics addressed include new reproductive and sexual technologies, cybernetics, androgyny, the third sex, pornography, and psychoanalysis and contemporary media/film theory.Contributors include Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Joan Riviere, Maria Torok, Melanie Klein, Nancy Chodorow, Juliet Mitchell, Noreen O'Connor and Joanna Ryan, Carl G. Jung, Esther Harding, Maria von Franz, Marion Woodman, Jacques Lacan, H l ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeva, Mary Jane Sherfey, Monique Wittig, Jacqeline Rose, Camille Paglia, Judith Butler, and Jane Flax.

The Shadow of the Object
The Shadow of the Object

Author: Christopher Bollas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1315437597

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud’s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character. During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts. Aspects of the unthought known --the primary repressed unconscious --will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought -- an experience that has enormous transformative potential. Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker.

Self and Other
Self and Other

Author: Robert Rogers

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0814774431

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Self and Other, Robert Rogers presents a powerful argument for the adoption of a theory of object relations, combining the best features of traditional psychoanalytic theory with contemporary views on attachment behavior and intersubjectivity. Rogers discusses theory in relation both to actual psychoanalytic case histories and imagined selves found in literature, and provides a critical rereading of the case histories of Freud, Winnicott, Lichtenstein, Sechehaye, and Bettelheim. At once scientific and humanistic, Self and Other engagingly draws from theoretical, clinical, and literary traditions. It will appeal to psychoanalysts as well as to literary scholars interested in the application of psychoanalysis to literature.

Transitional Subjects
Transitional Subjects

Author: Amy Allen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0231544782

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and other members of this school. Featuring contributions from some of the leading figures working in both of these fields, including Axel Honneth, Joel Whitebook, Noëlle McAfee, Sara Beardsworth, and C. Fred Alford, it provides a synoptic overview of current research at the intersection of these two theoretical traditions while also opening up space for further innovations. Transitional Subjects offers a range of perspectives on the critical potential of object-relations psychoanalysis, including feminist and Marxist views, to offer valuable insight into such fraught social issues as aggression, narcissism, “progress,” and torture. The productive dialogue that emerges augments our understanding of the self as intersubjectively and socially constituted and of contemporary “social pathologies.” Transitional Subjects shows how critical theory and object-relations psychoanalysis, considered together, have not only enriched critical theory but also invigorated psychoanalysis.

An Introduction to Object Relations
An Introduction to Object Relations

Author: Lavinia Gomez

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1997-03

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780814730959

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What does it mean to be human? Object relations, the British- based development of classic Freudian psychoanalytic theory, is based on the belief that the human being is essentially social; the need for relationship is central to the definition of the self. Object relations theory forms the base of psychoanalysts' work, including Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Michael Balint, H.J.S. Guntrip, and John Bowlby. Lavinia Gomez here provides an introduction to the main theories and applications of object relations. Through its detailed focus on internal and interpersonal unconscious processes, object relations can help psychotherapists, counselors and others in social service professions to understand and work with people who may otherwise seem irrational, unpredictable and baffling.

The Matrix of the Mind
The Matrix of the Mind

Author: Thomas H. Ogden

Publisher: Jason Aronson

Published: 1993-07

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1568210515

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is exciting, original, and above all accessible–a rare combination for a text which deals in depth with psychoanalytical theory. Non-analysts are frequently both baffled and alienated by the jargon and the complexity of works which extend psychoanalytical thinking, but Ogden is revealed in this book as an outstanding communicator as well as a major theoretician. The book's subtitle is a guide to the main focus of the work, which reinterprets the work of Melanie Klein, with its focus on phantasy, in relation to the biological determinants of perception and the meaning and organization of experience in the interpersonal setting of human growth and development. Ogden re-interprets Klein to illuminate Freudian instinct theory, using the contributions of Bion, Fairbairn, and particularly Winnicott–British object relations theorists–to clarify and extend aspects of their work and to move towards an impressive exposition of the way in which the human mind develops." –Pamela M. Ashurst, The British Journal of Psychiatry A Jason Aronson Book

Objects of Hope
Objects of Hope

Author: Steven H. Cooper

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1134898940

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness. Cooper's task is challenging, given that the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives. The analysis of hope, then, implicates what Cooper sees as a central dialectic tension in psychoanalysis: that between psychic possibility and psychic limit. He argues that analysts have historically had difficulty integrating the concept of limit into a treatment modality so dedicated to the creation and augmentation of psychic possibility. And yet, it is only by accepting the realm of limit as a necessary counterpoise to the realm of possibility and clinically embracing the tension between the two realms that analysts can further their understanding of therapeutic process in the interest of better treatment outcomes. Cooper persuasively demonstrates how each psychoanalytic theory provides its own logic of hope; this logic, in turn, translates into a distinctive sense of what the analyst may hope for the patient, and what the patient is encouraged to hope for himself or herself. Objects of Hope brings ranging scholarship and refreshing candor to bear on the knotty issue of what can and cannot be achieved in the course of psychoanalytic therapy. It will be valued not only as an exemplary exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, but also as a thoughtful, original effort to place the vital issue of hope at the center of clinical concern.