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.

Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip on the social significance of schizoids

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110080
Author(s):  
Gal Gerson
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Developmental Phase ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Real Person

The mid-century object relations approach saw the category of schizoids as crucial to its own formation. Rooted in a developmental phase where the perception of the mother as a whole and real person had not yet been secured, the schizoid constitution impeded relationships and forced schizoids to communicate through a compliant persona while the kernel self remained isolated. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip thought that schizoid features underlay many other pathologies that earlier, Freudian psychoanalysis had misidentified. To correct this, a move to the attachment-oriented theory was necessary, triggering the development of the object relations perspective as a distinct and independent approach. While playing this role in the development of object relations theory, the schizoid category also attracted a note of disapproval. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip described schizoids as harmful to society through their everyday actions and through the ideas they propagated. This judgemental nuance highlights an aspect of the alliance between object relations theory and the contemporary welfare state ideology. Culminating in the Beveridge plan, that ideology framed citizenship as comprehensive engagement with society on multiple levels. Citizenship was not just a political activity but also a personally rewarding one, as it allowed expression to each person’s wishes in ways that benefited others. Inability to engage and be rewarded in this way marked obstinate classes and produced rigid and conservative ideologies that opposed the welfare state. Object relations theory described the schizoid condition along similar lines and castigated its consequences for similar reasons.

scholarly journals What Can it Mean to Say that the Individual is Social through and through?

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Stacey
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Individual

This article explores different ways of thinking about the group-analytic concept of the individual as social through and through. One explanation is based on object relations theory and regards the individual as social because the individual psyche is an `internal world' of representations of social relationships. The article argues that this represents a Kantian `both/and' way of thinking. Another approach is based on Mead and this suggests that the individual is social through and through because individual mind is the same process of bodily action as the social. This represents a dialectical mode of thinking derived from Hegel.

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.

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.

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