Originality, Dread, and Object Usage: Commentary on Papers by Sarah Mendelsohn and Deborah Dowd

Lucinda Ballantyne, LICSW, is on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, at the Cambridge Health Alliance Program for Psychotherapy. She has been developing the ideas she puts forward here about object usage since introducing them at the 2014 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Division of Psychoanalysis (39). She most recently presented her extended interpretation of object usage as a dynamic of disruptive originality that is internal as well as external in a paper titled “Wallace with Winnicott: Disturbances of Originality in Literature and Clinical Work,” given at the 2017 Solange Skinner Conference at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She has a private practice in Cambridge, MA.
Correspondence should be addressed to Lucinda Ballantyne, LICSW, 678 Mass Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139,USA. E-mail: