Meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

February 14, 1984. THE DETERMINANTS OF OBJECT CHOICE IN ADULTHOOD: A CLINICAL TEST OF OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY. Peter Buckley, M.D.

Dr. Buckley presented a clinical example of the effects of the absence of the father during the childhood of a male analysand and in particular its consequence for his later object choice. The case illustrated the manner in which the experience of the absence of the father in childhood became connected with drive and development so that an unconscious fantasy was established which profoundly influenced later object choice. For this patient it was not simply the experience of an absent father that determined later object choice, but the development of a mental representation of the lost father cathected with sexual and aggressive drives organized around a persistent set of unconscious fantasy wishes. The case demonstrated that the nature of adult object choice is dependent on an interrelationship of identification, defense, object relations, and instinctual gratification. This is in contrast to the view of object relations theorists that early object relations determine the nature of later object choice.

The patient was the only child of his mother's first marriage. When he was six months old, his father abandoned him and his mother, and the patient had no subsequent contact with his father. He was raised by his mother and his maternal grandmother who lived nearby, and when he was five, his mother remarried. During the early phase of the analysis the patient was preoccupied with what he viewed as similarities between himself and his biological father. He felt that he was a "bad seed" and that he had genetically inherited a capacity for irresponsibility and destructive behavior. An unconscious sense of criminality gradually became increasingly prominent. This was based on an identification with his biological father's action of leaving him. Even in absence, his father had been a powerful force in the patient's mental life, and