Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lana Lin
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Psychic Life ◽  
The Core ◽  
Eve Sedgwick ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Lost Object

The Introduction lays out the key terms, organization, and methodology of the book. It details how Freud’s Jaw relies on psychoanalytic object relations theory—in particular theories on part-objects, attachment and dependency (anaclisis), mourning, melancholia, and fetishism. These psychoanalytic concepts are mobilized to probe the psychic life and death of human and nonhuman objects and to throw light upon how illness initiates processes of objectification. Each chapter focuses on a different type of object, which bears a relation to the psychoanalytic lost object: the prosthetic object, the “first object” (the breast), love objects, and reparative objects. Through its examination of autopathographies, including the author’s own autopathographic observations, the book fleshes out a “subjectivity of survival.” For Sigmund Freud survival entailed maintenance and adjustment of his oral prostheses; for Audre Lorde it was bound up with a politics of self-preservation; for Eve Sedgwick it was explicitly a reparative project. The chapter explains how cancer carries psychoanalytic meaning, confirming that death has always occupied the core of psychoanalysis as a tragic discourse.

Keen for the First Object

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lana Lin
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Social Pressure ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Racial Hatred ◽  
Breast Prosthesis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lost Object

This chapter interprets Audre Lorde’s experience of cancer and racial injury through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of sadistic aggression, mourning, and psychic reparation. Drawing on Klein’s theories of the maternal breast as the first part-object, the original lost object that initiates a cycle of destruction and reparation, the chapter considers the psychic consequences of losing the breast through the traumatic processes of weaning and invasive carcinoma. For Lorde, illness, racism, sexism, and homophobia are conjoined as objectifying forces. The chapter inquires into how psychoanalytic object relations theory contends with objectification—becoming the object of a fatal disease, racial hatred, or sexist assault. Indicating how destruction can play a part in reparation, Lorde described her own mastectomy as breaking off a piece of herself to make her whole. She rejects the breast prosthesis on the grounds that it enforces objectifying gender norms. Lorde’s critique of the “prosthetic pretense” is applied to contemporary breast cancer culture. The chapter proposes that one of the unconscious motivations behind the social pressure to reconstruct the breast stems from a fetishism of the first object.

The Contribution of Creative Responses to the Experience of Shame in Couple Psychotherapy

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amita Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Couple Therapy ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Core ◽  
Developmental Significance ◽  
The Relationship

This paper describes how the emotional states of shame and humiliation are interconnected. Recent neurophysiological findings are drawn on together with an appreciation of the developmental significance of shame in mother–infant interactions in the first two years of life to explain the importance of the application of these concepts to couple therapy. Object relations theory is also cited to explore some of the unconscious dynamics that might be operating in couples where shame and humiliation form the core of their relational dynamic. This is followed by the description of how partners can be helped to manage the other's shame effectively and, in so doing, give rise to a novel and much longed-for experience within the relationship. Finally, the clinical challenges of working with shame and humiliation in couple psychotherapy are considered.

Psychotherapy

2013 ◽  
pp. 819-864
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Group Psychotherapy ◽  
Learning Theory ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Behaviour Therapy ◽  
Cognitive Behaviour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Learning

Introduction Assessment for psychotherapy A brief history of Sigmund Freud Other pioneers of psychoanalysis Basic psychoanalytical theory Defence mechanisms Theory of psychosexual development Object relations theory Psychoanalysis 1 Psychoanalysis 2 Psychodynamic psychotherapy Group psychotherapy Basic learning theory Behaviour therapy Cognitive behaviour therapy 1 Cognitive behaviour therapy 2...

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Melanie Klein ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Psychic Life ◽  
Novel Reading

This introductory chapter explains that the book provides a background on Victorian novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—two writers who have set the fundamental terms for contemporary critical conceptualizations of late nineteenth-century realism, domestic fiction, and psychological novel. Both writers' works demonstrate an abiding interest in character and readerly interiority and in making overarching claims about social and psychic life. It talks about the practices of narration and characterization deployed by Eliot and Hardy, which are more fruitfully uneven and unintegrated than retrospective accounts that place these writers in a realist tradition. The chapter reveals some of the ways in which the profound relationality of novel reading has been foreclosed and opened back up again. In an effort to draw out the relationality of the Victorian novels, the chapter places them in conversation with a key theoretical discourse: British psychoanalysis, whose mid-twentieth- century theorists and practitioners developed “object relations” theory by building from the foundational writings of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.

An object-relations theory of the personality.

1955 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 366-367
Author(s):  
Dan L. Adler
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Object Relations Theory

Fairbairnian approaches to King Roger , the opera by Karol Szymanowski

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-86
Author(s):  
Graham S. Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Karol Szymanowski

In what follows I will develop an account of Fairbairn's object relations theory as I have understood and developed it, and, apply that theory to an understanding of the threeact opera King Roger, Op. 26 (1926) by Karol Szymanowski. My Fairbairnian approaches to the opera come from my previous work on Fairbairn's object relations theory. In order to fully understand the first of the approaches I employ you may need to read my book Personal Relations Theory (Clarke, 2006), in particular chapters one, five, and six. In order to fully understand the second of the approaches I am using you need to read Thinking Through Fairbairn (Clarke, 2018a), in particular chapters two, three, and four, as well as my paper in the journal Attachment (Clarke, 2018b) on MPD/DID and Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms.

Shakespearean Melancholy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Core ◽  
Robert Burton

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.

scholarly journals Costa, cancer and coronavirus: contractualism as a guide to the ethics of lockdown

2021 ◽  
pp. medethics-2020-107103
Author(s):  
Stephen David John ◽  
Emma J Curran
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Core ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Moral Distinction ◽  
Self Defence

Lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involve placing huge burdens on some members of society for the sake of benefiting other members of society. How should we decide when these policies are permissible? Many writers propose we should address this question using cost-benefit analysis (CBA), a broadly consequentialist approach. We argue for an alternative non-consequentialist approach, grounded in contractualist moral theorising. The first section sets up key issues in the ethics of lockdown, and sketches the apparent appeal of addressing these problems in a CBA frame. The second section argues that CBA fundamentally distorts the normative landscape in two ways: first, in principle, it allows very many morally trivial preferences—say, for a coffee—might outweigh morally weighty life-and-death concerns; second, it is insensitive to the core moral distinction between victims and vectors of disease. The third section sketches our non-consequentialist alternative, grounded in Thomas Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory. On this account, the ethics of self-defence implies a strong default presumption in favour of a highly restrictive, universal lockdown policy: we then ask whether there are alternatives to such a policy which are justifiable to all affected parties, paying particular attention to the complaints of those most burdened by policy. In the fourth section, we defend our contractualist approach against the charge that it is impractical or counterintuitive, noting that actual CBAs face similar, or worse, challenges.

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