Hot Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, and Bad Objects: Discussion of “Contempt Management: You’re Crazy, I’m Not”

I reflect on Larry Josephs and Jett Stone’s informative article (this issue), which provides a scholarly review of contempt and contempt management, theorizing links between contempt, shame, hierarchy, and power. The authors explore and illustrate how contempt/shame cycles can be enacted and worked with therapeutically. I value the project of deepening our understanding of an affective/interpersonal dynamic that often emerges in difficult clinical encounters in which contempt and shame are frequently tossed about like hot potatoes. While appreciating Josephs and Stone’s ideas, I reconsider the clinical material through my own relational lens (informed by object relational and developmental perspectives) and offer a second look, focusing on singular meanings and unique relational dynamics. I ask, in essence, “Whose contemptible object are we anyway?” Additionally, I discuss the authors’ contribution as it relates to a larger inquiry into the survival of destruction in psychoanalysis. I conclude by suggesting that this paper points to the importance of continually attending to power dynamics and the attendant risks of unconscious coercions in the mutual but asymmetric psychoanalytic encounter as relationally conceived.