Description
Using Winnicott’s classic paper as its starting point, this fascinating collection explores a range of clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic perspectives around relating to "the object." Each author approaches the topic from a different angle, switching among the patient’s use of others in their internal and external lives, their use of their therapist, and the therapist’s own use of their patients.
The use of objects is susceptible to wide interpretation and elaboration; it is both a normal phenomenon and a marker for certain personal difficulties, or even psychopathologies, seen in clinical practice. While it is normal for people to relate to others through the lens of their internal objects in ways that give added meaning to aspects of their lives, it becomes problematic when people live as if devoid of a self and instead live almost exclusively through the others who form their internal worlds, often leading them to feel that they cannot be happy until and unless others change.
Assessing the significance of objects among adult and child patients, groups and the group-as-object, and exploring Freud’s own use of objects, The Use of the Object in Psychoanalysis will be of significant interest both to experienced psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and to trainees exploring important theoretical questions.
Table of Contents
Introduction
David E. Scharff
Chapter 1
David E. Scharff
Living Through Objects
Chapter 2
Jim Poulton
What Does the Other (in Our Patients' Lives) Have to Do with It?
Chapter 3
Carl Bagnini
Dreaming Up, Re-Finding, and Grieving Lost Objects: A Case Study
Chapter 4
Caroline Sehon
Illuminating the Shadows of the Object World
Chapter 5
Nancy Bakalar
Analysis Interminable: The Analyst’s Self as Object for the Patient
Chapter 6
Ron Aviram
Can an Ingroup be an Internal Object: Explorations of the Social Object Representation Concept
Chapter 7
Juan Tubert-Oklander
Beyond Subject and Object or Why Object–Usage Is Not a Good Idea
Chapter 8
Jill Savege Scharff
The Internal Object in Self and Other
Epilogue
David Scharff
