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Gay Subjects Relating: Object Relations Between Gay Therapist and Gay Client
Published in Elizabeth Peel, Victoria Clarke, Jack Drescher, British Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Psychologies, 2020
Freud fled Austria to England in 1938 (Jones, 1953). While psychoanalysis vanished under the Nazi occupation of Vienna, it was to be re-born in Hampstead, North London. After Freud’s death in 1939, his daughter Anna Freud inherited the mantle of what came to be known as classical psychoanalysis and ego psychology in the US (Young-Bruehl, 1988). However, in the UK, Melanie Klein, through her clinical focus on the early experience of children, hypothesized a theoretical model that would lead to the development of contemporary object relations theory.
From the mind to the body
Published in Ruth Skrine, Blocks and Freedoms in Sexual Life, 2019
I believe it is important for us to develop a language in which the emotions that relate to the sexual body can be discussed both between doctor and patient and among doctors. The use of language borrowed from other disciplines is likely to alienate not only our patients, but our colleagues as well. If one reads Jungian psychology, terms such as 'puer', those characteristics associated with youth and creativity, and 'senex', those of the old man aspects of a person, can take on a useful meaning. For an outsider they leave one feeling excluded and lacking in understanding. The Freudian language of super-ego, ego and id formed a basis from which the working of the human psyche began to be studied, but ideas and languages have developed and diversified. Object relations theory, which underlies much psychotherapeutic understanding, is not easy for the newcomer to digest.
The Developmental Method in Drama Therapy
Published in Susan L. Sandel, David Read Johnson, Waiting at the Gate: Creativity and Hope in the Nursing Home, 2014
Object Relations Theory. This theory holds that each person builds a representation of the self and others by internalizing sets of interpersonal relations (object relations) from infancy through adulthood. Initially, these relations are characterized by a lack of differentiation and integration, so that the distinction between self and other, or inside and outside, is poorly defined. As one matures, these “images” of relationships become more differentiated and accurate, and are increasingly integrated into a coherent self-image, and coherent representations of other people and the world (Kernberg, 1976). Thus, the internal world of the person consists of layers of self and other representations, some quite primitive that are derived from early experience, and others more sophisticated in form which are organized at later stages. Under stress or special environmental conditions, each person has access to these earlier forms of self/other relations. These earlier forms also tend to emerge when the media expression are of an earlier developmental level, such as sound, movement, or gesture. In fact, Schimek (1975) has suggested that the unconcious is really these early object relations contained in nonverbal forms of representation, which explains why the arts therapies are so powerful in their ability to elicit surprising and otherwise hidden parts of ourselves.
How Much Training Do We Need? Assessing the Validity and Interrater Reliability of the PDM-2’s Psychodiagnostic Chart among Less Experienced Clinicians
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2023
Marko Biberdzic, Brin F. S. Grenyer
Interestingly, despite the PDM providing clear anchor points for each of the 12 mental functions in the M-Axis to help guide the clinician’s rating, results suggest that the inter-rater reliability was much higher when assessing the core domains of personality organization in the P-Axis than when rating both the overall level of mental functioning in the M-Axis and each of the 12 mental functions. This suggests that the notion of personality organization and the broader framework relating to Kernberg’s object relations theory is particularly accessible to students, more so than the specific assessment of psychological processes such as “capacity for regulation, attention, and learning”. It is therefore not surprising that, out of the 12 mental functions, those with the highest inter-rater reliability indices were those related to identity, interpersonal relationships, and defensive functioning. These findings have potential implications for student training, suggesting that contemporary psychodynamic models such as Kernberg’s object relations theory can be a good starting point for students undergoing psychodynamic training.
Contact: William S. Burroughs’s philosophy of love
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2023
Object relations theory is often thought to have begun when Melanie Klein began to expand upon Freud’s theory of pregenital stages. Her main innovation was her detection of an Oedipal-like mixture of love and hate directed by children towards their mothers (Klein, 1935, 1946/1986). During the first psychosexual phase, the oral-cannibalistic, the child experiences the breast as either a ‘good breast’ that gives satisfaction, or a ‘bad breast’ that poisons the child by withholding the life-giving liquid from him (Klein, 1935, pp. 140–141). The anal phase, especially in Klein’s early writings, follows the Freudian line, but adds an emphasis on the child’s temptation to view the parents as persecutors who could annihilate him in retaliation for the phantasied cannibalistic attacks made upon the ‘bad breast’ during the oral period (Klein, 1946/1986, pp. 187–188). The other challenge for the toilet-training child is to avoid becoming wracked with subconscious anxiety and guilt over what might be termed his ‘oral-iginal sin’ (my term) of wishing to rid himself of their existence by suppressing his knowledge of them as ‘bad objects’ (Klein & Klein, 1952/1975, pp. 72–73).
Hypnotic Ego-strengthening: Where We’ve Been and the Road Ahead
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2020
Object relations theory (Summers, 1994), and in particular, Melanie Klein (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983) introduced the ideas of patterns of anxieties and defenses, termed the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. To simplify, the paranoid-schizoid position involves loving relations and hateful relations as separate from each other, and the external object as either good or bad. In the depressive position, loving and hating can occur together, and the object is a whole person who can be both good and bad. According to Klein, working through the depressive position strengthens the ego by growth and assimilation of good objects. According to object relations theory, the ego can’t be experienced subjectively because it is “the observer within the observed” (Hamilton, 1988).