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Jill Scharff Candidly Tells us that, in the next-to-the-last session summarized in her presentation, her patient's devaluations made her feel worthless and that she began to wonder whether any of the discussants would have ideas that would help this very difficult and painful analytic relationship more than her own. I'll give it a try. I begin by briefly discussing Scharff's theoretical ideas, their genealogy, and some of their differences from mine. My understanding of her theoretical viewpoint derives both from my reading of her clinical presentation and from a perusal of The Primer of Object Relations Therapy, which she wrote with her husband (Scharff and Scharff, 1995).
Scharff's object relations perspective casts a wide net. Her emphasis on affective containment and holding—an emphasis I share—harks back to the metaphorical language of Bion and Winnicott. Her assumptions about the pathogenicity of rage and envy and the process of projective identification—assumptions I do not share—derive from Kleinian roots. Her view of psychological life in terms of an endopsychic world of internal objects—particularly internalized bad objects—is strongly reminiscent of Fairbairn's work. In a critique I wrote of Fairbairn's contributions. I noted that, although