You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper was written for a special issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57 (October 1988): part iv, devoted to the topic of object relations.
Object relations are at the core of psychoanalytic work — they are the stuff of the transference — and whatever our theory of object relations, it must deeply influence our understanding of the nature of transference. Freud discovered the existence of transference directly from clinical observation, where he saw that the patient inevitably repeated parts of his past relationships with his analyst. Only subsequently did he start to formulate his ideas on object relations. All analysts now hold theories of object relations, basically rooted in Freud's work. I want to start from a theoretical angle, bringing first some theoretical observations, and then some vignettes of clinical material, in order to show object relations as they are lived out in the consulting room. I shall discuss how my understanding of this clinical material derives from my theoretical background, but also how such theory has constantly to be re-discovered in actual clinical work. I think that this re-discovery can best take place by examining object relations as they emerge dynamically in the transference.
Freud, in his work on object relations, described the various stages that the child went through in the course of its development. He assumed that in the earliest stages, there was no emotional relationship to objects, only to the self; this he described as primary narcissism. He thought that only later did the young child begin to relate to people outside himself. From this assumption he described how some individuals continued to build their relationships on the basis of a narcissistic type of object choice. He discussed how, for example, in schizophrenia the patient could be seen to have withdrawn back into an objectless, narcissistic state. Freud (1914) emphasized that clinically what we usually see is what he called
‘secondary narcissism’ — that