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Marie Coleman Nelson (1968) has derived a technique for psychoanalytic therapy based on the enactment of various roles by the therapist which are inherent in an individual's personality. She uses this role-playing technique to resolve resistance and promote maturational growth.
My intention is to recapitulate some of her ideas, connecting them where possible to other aspects of psychoanalytic treatment and to my own experience as a clinician. Included are observations from two week-long seminars taught by Nelson which were sponsored by Heed University.
The paradigmatic approach as developed and explained by Nelson pays particular attention to roles the patient plays and to introjects which are the identifications to objects inherent in those roles. In The Ego and the Id Freud described the ego as a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes. Melanie Klein discusses object relationships in terms of an introjection into the ego from infancy of part objects such as the breast and then whole objects like parental figures. Hanna Segal (1964) in her work on Klein states that “It is by analyzing the ego's relations with objects internal and external and altering the phantasies about these objects, that we can materially affect the ego's more permanent structure.” Nelson, by studying the various selves and the roles they play, reflects these roles back to the patient, thus