Internal Object Relations

2018 ◽  
pp. 131-165
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Ogden
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-360
Author(s):  
Monica Carsky

The clinical and technical difficulties presented by patients with personality disorders are well documented. This article focuses on the challenges faced by therapists when managing their emotional reactions, that is, their countertransferences, to patients with personality disorders. While leaving room for therapists' unique and idiosyncratic countertransferences to the patient with personality pathology, Kernberg emphasized the role of a more general form of countertransference, one reflective largely of the patient's conflicts and defenses, in the treatments of personality disordered individuals. Here, the nature of the patient's internal and external functioning can be seen to lead to similar reactions among different therapists, opening the possibility of utilizing countertransference to better understand the patient's difficulties. In transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), countertransferences arising in the patient–therapist interaction are first identified and contained by the therapist and then utilized to clarify and explore how the patient's internal object relations are being enacted in the clinical process. This article describes this process and how TFP therapists work with their countertransference to help illuminate the patient's split representational world, paving the way for interpretation and integration.


2018 ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Joseph Sandler ◽  
Anne-Marie Sandler ◽  
Otto F. Kernberg

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Arthur G. Crosswell

Advances the thesis that H. R. Niebuhr's theology provides a theological context in which the landscape described by object relations theory can be placed, illustrating the thesis with case material.


2021 ◽  
Vol 108 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-361
Author(s):  
Ofrit Shapira-Berman

The author discusses Winnicott's theory (1949/1975) of the psyche-soma and Fairbairn's (1944) theory of internal object relations, bringing them together to enrich our perspective of one's somatization. By focusing on how the patient takes care, attends, experiences, and feels toward the symptom, the analyst can better understand the patient's early object-relations. This allows analyst and patient to rethink the symptom in terms of the patient's early traumas and one's capacity to mourn the loss of the love-object. Fairbairn's conceptualizations of the “rejecting,” “alluring,” and “addictive” object-relations are combined with Winnicott's understanding of the split between psyche and soma, following the ill-adaptation of the mother to the baby's earliest emotional needs.


1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Patrick ◽  
R. Peter Hobson ◽  
David Castle ◽  
Robert Howard ◽  
Barbara Maughan

AbstractControversy surrounds the role of early social experience in the development of personality disorder. In particular, little is known of the means by which continuities from infancy through adulthood might be mediated. One suggestion is that a person's mental representations of relations between him- or herself and other people, either in the form of “internal working models” or “internal object relations,” provide the essential link. We report on an investigation of this issue in which we focused on the formal qualities of accounts of childhood offered by adults who were drawn from two contrasting clinical groups; borderline personality disorder and dysthymia. The results lend support to the claims made by attachment theory and the object relations school of psychoanalysis, that at least in certain groups of individuals, adults' modes of representing early experience are intimately related to styles of interpersonal functioning. More specifically, the form of interpersonal Psychopathology characteristic of borderline personality disorder may be associated with enmeshed and unresolved patterns of responding to the Adult Attachment Interview of George, Kaplan, and Main (1985) and with reports of low maternal care and high maternal overprotection on the Parental Bonding Instrument of Parker, Tupling, and Brown (1979).


2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 197-203
Author(s):  
Penny Lewis†

Abstract. From my training with Marian Chace came much of the roots of my employment of dance therapy in my work. The use of empathic movement reflection assisted me in the development of the technique of somatic countertransference ( Lewis, 1984 , 1988 , 1992 ) and in the choreography of the symbiotic phase in object relations ( Lewis, 1983 , 1987a , 1988 , 1990 , 1992 ). Marian provided the foundation for assistance in separation and individuation through the use of techniques which stimulated skin (body) and external (kinespheric) boundary formation. Reciprocal embodied response and the use of thematic imaginal improvisations provided the foundation for the embodied personification of intrapsychic phenomena such as the internalized patterns, inner survival mechanisms, addictions, and the inner child. Chace’s model assisted in the development of structures for the remembering, re-experiencing, and healing of child abuse as well as the rechoreography of object relations. Finally, Marian Chace’s use of synchronistic group postural rhythmic body action provided access to the transformative power of ritual in higher stages of individuation and spiritual consciousness.


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