

Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
Sigmund Freud offered the concept of object relation. In 1920s and 1930s object relation theory was carried out by Otto Rank. And lately by 1970s the theory gained fame with work of Klein, Winnicott, Kernberg, Mahler.
Typology: Lecture notes
1 / 2
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Object relations theory proposes to explain the way in which inner representations are formed and how they manifest in human conduct. The origins of this theory lay in Freud’s view that drive discharge occurred through the investment of the object, i.e., the caregiver, the “object” being the target of the drive. Object relations theo- ries diverged from this by postulating that human beings are primarily motivated to seek object contact , not to discharge drives. These theories tried to address issues that drive theory and ego psychological theories had neglected. For example, although object relations theorists acknowledge that there is an ego, they consider it to be object seeking and even say that it exists only in so far as it is connected to an object. One outgrowth of object relations theories is the emphasis on the con- cepts of self-representation and object-representation, concepts that were intro- duced by Hartmann (1964 , p. xii) (see also Jacobson, 1964) , which develop through experiences with objects. Self-structure is formed as a result of the internalization of early experiences in relationships with objects and the formation of stable self- representations and object-representations. Object relations theories suggest that if relationships with early caregivers are satisfying, the representation of the object that the child internalizes will be of a good object and imbued with love. However, if the experiences are not satisfying, the representation will be of a bad object imbued with hate. Since self-representa- tions develop in parallel with those of object representations, the developmental task consists in reconciling the good and bad primitive object representations. If this occurs, the child can experience ambivalence toward the object and achieve object constancy, that is, a stable object-representation that is distinct from the self- representation. Furthermore, the child internalizes the patterns of the early interac- tions between it and the caregiver; these relational patterns prescribe how the person will relate to others in the world and in therapy. Klein , influenced and encouraged by Abraham, interpreted Freud’s drives to be central to the organization of infants’ fantasies, or phantasies , as she preferred to designate them because they were unconscious. Her emphasis, however, was on infants’ relationships to their objects and the internalization of their experiences with those objects. Their inner worlds became populated by the phantasies they had of their caregivers. Winnicott became embroiled in the controversy between Anna
128 Object Relations Theories
Freud and Klein’s views of children’s development and the implication of those views for treatment. Being an original thinker who cut his own path into the thicket of psychoanalytic theory, he declared himself as belonging to the group of inde- pendent psychoanalysts who chose a middle road in the dispute. Mahler steered her own course by deemphasizing the prominence of the drives and formulating her unique view that children’s development is analogous to what occurs to an embryo. Children progress from a symbiotic phase during which they are undifferentiated from their caregivers and progress to a phase during which they achieve separation and individuation. Finally, Kernberg synthesized the ego psychological and devel- opmental models of Freud, Klein, Jacobson and Mahler to build a framework that is verifiable through research strategies. He proposed that his framework had broad application to the explication of the dynamics of some types of psychopathology, in particular the narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. The developmental theories that emerged from object relations theories remain within the positivist, science-based perspective of the drive theorists. They sub- scribed to an organismic model that conceives of the child as in need of positive psychological nourishment to thrive. However, the children’s fantasies may con- taminate what they take in irrespective of the responses the external world provides. In brief, this organismic model emphasized the adequacy, or inadequacy, of the child’s relationship to the object. It valued the object’s responsiveness to the needs of the child, seeing it as determining whether the child will progress successfully through the subsequent developmental phases. If the nutriment that the object offers was toxic, i.e., enveloped by anger or detachment, then the child developed a case of psychic indigestion, and could not metabolize the incorporated object. In its extreme form, some developmental models played many variations on the theme of this metaphor. In particular, Klein’s descriptions of the vicissitudes of children’s psychic indigestion are an example. Children may throw up what they take in, as in the defense of projection that is dominant in the paranoid position; or, they may re-ingest what they have thrown up, as in the defense of projective identification; or, children may refuse further nourishment and collapse into an anorectic, depressed state and fail to thrive, as in the depressive position.
Hartmann, H. (1964). Essays on ego psychology: Selected problems in psychoanalytic theory. New York, NY: International Universities Press. Jacobson, E. (1964). The self and the object world. New York, NY: International Universities Press.