Object relations (psychoanalysis)

The goal of Buddhism is to gain enlightenment through the realization of the psychological basis of human suffering. Like other religions Buddhists undertake this goal together in a community known as the Sangha, which, includes lay practitioners, clergy, and various symbolic figures. While, the ostensible goal of the Sangha is to help Buddhists reach a state of religious epiphany, it also functions in a psychological fashion to moderate the regressive effects of group membership. This moderation allows the Sangha to facilitate individuation for its members while they maintain their group membership. In this way the Sangha provides a practical method for applying spiritual principals to relationships with others in the group and later, to the world at large. This paper will review classical and object relations views of group psychology and then apply these perspectives to the understanding of the Sangha.

Gestalt Therapy techniques are considered to be powerful tools for the remobilization of human growth and change. I will attempt to show that the power of these techniques lies in the fact that they are effective ways of dealing with our "internalizations". I will first briefly review object relation theory and then discuss gestalt techniques as they pertain to internal objects.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

Fairbairn's theory of aesthetic experience is presented in relation to a comment by Herbert Read on its usefulness to the study of art, from a letter Read wrote to Fairbairn in 1939. It is argued that Fairbairn's psychology of dynamic structure combines the restitution of the mother that is characteristic of Kleinian theories of art and the restitution of the self that is characteristic of Winnicottian theories of art. Contemporary examples of Young British Artists discussing how they make art appear to share an understanding of the process of art making that is consistent with Fairbairn's theory. The processes of psychic growth within Fairbairn as described by John Padel are equated with a general theory of creativity. It is suggested that this theory can help us to understand key moments of creativity within specific artist's lives by reference to important changes in object relationships during key periods in three artists lives.

OR theory offers the therapist a window into the “inner world” of mental representations, how one represents, perceives and understands their world and their relationship in it, that enables a counsellor to explore the client’s behaviour and motivations (deepest unmet needs/longings). Such past representations seem to serve as emotional filters; colouring and shaping current intrapsychic perceptions and interpsychic relationships. Such relational perceptions best serve the therapeutic alliance and offer the analyst & analysands insights into what drives the couple’s relationship.

Donald Winnicott's radical existential psychoanalytic understanding of transitional awareness and transitional relatedness is an amazing and little used doorway for today's psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. In today's cognitive clinical culture we have become cognitions tampering with cognitions. Life as cognition. Existential Ontology Winnicott's creative understanding of our capacity for transitional awareness and transitional relatedness intertwines both our personal psychology and our innermost experience of our own existential ontology. Transitional knowingness intertwines both our mind and our primordial awareness field. Our field of awareness knows the field of Being since awareness is the field of Being. Transitional awareness intertwines both our mind and our psyche. Donald Winnicott's phenomenological understanding of the self radicalizes our sense of self from being a representational picture or cognitive affective schema or synthesis of disparate psychological part's to a fluid sense of self as a direct experiential felt sense of ongoing continuity of Being. Our knowingness though the medium of awareness, opens for us the direct knowing of the experience of Being. The experience of Being is for us our sense of natural spirituality. Our liminal transitional awareness field opens us into the immediate ongoing intimate experience of Being. This experience of Being is of Being within our very own self and of Being within our very own relational life-world. Ordinary Personhood We, as a most ordinary person, can experience the unfolding movement of the experiencing of Being within our own self as our self, and simultaneously, the unfolding experiencing of our own being as the being-ness of Being which is the Being of the world. As we experience the Being .

Research into the use of transitional objects (Winnicott, 1971) by adult clients in psychotherapy has given little attention to the question of how a transitional object (TO) works. This question is addressed through the use of a semi-structured interview. Data was collected on the clinical practice and theoretical understanding of TO emergence and use of three psychodynamic-interpersonal (PI) and three Gestalt psychotherapists. A grounded theory analysis suggests that a TO works by a process of embodiment which can be structured with reference to a four-level model consisting of physical, process, contextual and conceptual levels. Therapists of both orientations emphasized the TO as a focus of intersubjectivity within the therapeutic relationship. Differences between the PI and Gestalt therapists are also examined. The clinical implications of this four-level model of embodiment for the use of TOs in psychotherapy are explored, together with suggestions for further research.

The aim of this study was to examine how transitional objects (TOs) work from the perspective of adult clients in psychotherapy. Data were collected using a semistructured interview with 6 female clients in humanistic psychotherapy. Grounded-theory analysis of this material suggests that a TO works through a 5-phase process of ‘holding’ in which the client successively integrates 3 themes: (a) the continuity of the therapist's existence, (b) connectedness with the therapist, and (c) the development of a new sense of self. A spiral microtheory is proposed that shows how these themes interact across time and relate to the client's experience of shame. The analysis suggests a use of TOs that is broader than D. W. Winnicott's (1953) conception and includes selfobject functions (H. Kohut, 1971).

Mind Alone For many years psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy was singularly centered on the unconscious mind and conscious mind. There was only mind and the mind could become aware of its own self and its own representational realm. The self itself was representational and the emphasis on the mind was in the light of analytic thinking and analytic observation. There was an emphasis on objectification of mental phenomena and subjectivity itself. Knowing was knowledge by association, by reflection and mediation by linguistic signifiers. Knowing was neither non-conceptual nor pre-reflective, nor was there a place for direct experiential knowingness. Knowing was associated as mind alone and singular mind functions such as thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and imagination. Transitional Space as Space of Awareness With the presentation of the work of Donald Winnicott there was a shift in the psychoanalytic understanding of knowingness. A similar change in psychoanalytic thinking about knowing was also taking place in the Jungian and archetypal analytic schools. In psychotherapy Winnicott emphasizes a focus on the suspension of mind and in the process of suspension of mind, awareness was freed to focus within awareness, free to focus itself on itself. In the suspension of mind (a Winnicottian form of the phenomenological reduction,) the patient relocates themselves. The patient relocates from being located in mind alone or even located in a particular function of mind alone such as: feeling function or thinking function or sensation function or memory function; the patient enters or relocates themselves into the intermediate area of experience. This intermediate area of experience or this in-between space of experience is also described as the transitional area of experience and relatedness. Sometime this place is also described as the place of potential space. The sense of self shifts from being located in the mind or mental function of the mind into the more embodied sense of spacious awareness or as the place of potential space. Winnicott would described this knowing

May 2006.

First paragraph: 
Patrick McEvoy-Halston1ENG 5063Alan Ackerman10 May 2006Moderns and their Mothers’ Reach: Returning to the Empowered Mother in TennesseeWilliams’
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
In
Terrible Honesty
, Ann Douglas argues that moderns felt they needed to find away to free themselves from their Victorian predecessors, and discusses how the cultural products of the modern period worked to fashion a milieu which enabled moderns to feelfree from their influence and command. Free, they fashioned one of the richest cultural periods that have ever existed. But she also argues that the moderns knew that a pricewould have to be paid for all this growth. She writes that they knew at some point, theMaternal—the “element” they repressed and beat back—would make stage a return, andmake them pay for their insolence. Some theorists—especially those influenced byobject-relations thought—argue, however, that the nature of how most of us experienceour own self growth and freedom would ensure that moderns would
themselves
stage thereturn to a matriarchal environment—that is, that She wouldn’t need to return, for theywould feel compelled to “come visit her.” I hope to suggest that some modernist playsmay have well served to both help effect the matricide Douglas argues modernist cultural products helped effect, and to vicariously offer them a means by which to temporarilyreturn to the maternally dominating environment they so loathed and feared. [...]

Antony Mary Claret (1807-1870), the founder of the missionary sons of the immaculate heart of Mary, archbishop of Cuba, and confessor to Queen Isabella II, was giant of a saint of the 19th century Spain. The three pillars of his mystical spirituality were the Eucharist, the Word of God, and the cordi-Marian sonship. One of the two “great graces” he is known to have received in the final decade of his life was the preservation of the Eucharist, day and night, within his breast, a grace that artists have captured in his portrayals by placing a bright light emanating from his chest. Much research and reflection have gone into the understanding of this grace. There has been no consensus among the researchers on the very mode of this presence. The researchers have generally focused on the theological and spiritual meaning of this grace. However, little research has been done on the precipitating and predisposing conditions in his environment both within and without that opened him up to the possibility of such an experience. The purpose of my paper is to analyze the eucharistic grace from the vantage point of object relational psychoanalysis. Drawing upon my own research into the analytic in the Eucharist and the kenotic-agapeic (K-A) position of human transformation that the Eucharist reveals and empowers one to live out, I argue that, among several factors that shaped Claret’s eucharistic grace, some of the early object relational experiences were significantly formative in predisposing Claret towards such a mystical experience. The eucharistic grace served to fill in his psycho-spiritual needs and worked with a goodness of fit with the shape of his psyche, enabling him to rise to the heights of human transformation and live the K-A position to the full.

[Suggested Citation: Veliyannoor, P. (2018). Breast Function of the Eucharist in Anthony Claret:  A psychoanalytic reading of the “great grace." Studia Claretiana, 33, 140-172.]

This essay presents a literary-critical account of Lord Byron’s verse drama Manfred (1817) from the perspective of Freudian and Object Relations psychological theories, in particular as regards the distinction between melancholia and mourning and the presence of part-objects within the psyche. It argues that whereas it is important to preserve a distinction between the poet and his works, such a distinction can never be total: like Childe Harold, Manfred is clearly in part a personal projection, given Byron’s state of mind at the time of composition. To provide context for these discussions the essay surveys both Byron’s personal views concerning suicide and the history of self-slaughter in Western culture, with Romanticism as a particular focus. The poet’s attitudes were many and various, depending on which cases he had in mind. Furthermore, the Romantic tradition initiated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and continued by Byron’s numerous treatments of suicide mark a complication of the attitudes we find voiced by Enlightenment philosophers and, indeed, by Sigmund Freud himself.

The goal of Buddhism is to gain enlightenment through the realization of the psychological basis of human suffering. Like other religions Buddhists undertake this goal together in a community known as the Sangha, which, includes lay practitioners, clergy, and various symbolic figures. While, the ostensible goal of the Sangha is to help Buddhists reach a state of religious epiphany, it also functions in a psychological fashion to moderate the regressive effects of group membership. This moderation allows the Sangha to facilitate individuation for its members while they maintain their group membership. In this way the Sangha provides a practical method for applying spiritual principals to relationships with others in the group and later, to the world at large. This paper will review classical and object relations views of group psychology and then apply these perspectives to the understanding of the Sangha.

In the article the author presents a model of interpersonal relationships based on integration of object relations theory and theory of attachment. He proposes three main bipolar dimensions of interpersonal relationships: Independence – Dependence, Connectedness – Alienation and Reciprocity – Self-absorption. The author also proposes that it is important to distinguish between two main types of adult interpersonal relationships: object and subject relations. Object relations describe relationships in which the other person is perceived as an object that serves the satisfaction of the first person's needs. Object relations are a manifestation of the right pole of the three main dimensions of interpersonal relationships (Dependence, Alienation and Self-absorption). Subject relations are a counter-pole to the concept of object relations. They describe relationships with other people who are experienced as subjects with their own wishes, interests and needs. Subject relations are a manifestation of the left pole of the main dimensions (Independence, Connectedness and Reciprocity). In this article the author specifically focuses on definitions of object relations in adulthood through a description of six sub-dimensions of object relations: Symbiotic Merging, Separation Anxiety, Social Isolation, Fear of Engulfment, Egocentrism and Narcissism. Every sub-dimension is described in connection to adaptive and pathological functioning. Further research is needed to test the clinical and scientific validity of the model.

How to Look Good Naked positions Gok Wan as a highly empathetic media
figure in popular media. Having a first-hand experience in dealing with body-image
discontent and low body-confidence, Wan’s highly empathetic approach towards his
subjects’ body-image concerns derives from his own earlier personal experience in
dealing with weight struggles and eating disorders. This paper explores how the
processes of emotional development depicted in How To Look Good Naked bring to the surface Gok Wan’s own unresolved experience with his body-related struggles. The
crucial role of the show’s emphasis on the ‘mirror sequence’ in enabling this reading is
examined in detail. This article makes use of the work of Donald Woods Winnicott, and
also Melanie Klein’s object relations theory, applying their ideas to selected episodes of
How to Look Good Naked in order to raise the question of what is at stake emotionally
for the makeover expert in his work on the programme. The article also discusses the
themes that recur in media narratives created by Gok Wan around his persona, exploring how his personal experience is echoed in the television strategies and formats popularised in the show.

Semantically, objects in unstructured document are related each other to perform a certain entity relation. This certain entity relation such: drug-drug interaction through their compounds, buyer-seller relationship through the goods or services, etc. Motivated by that kind of interaction, this study proposes a method to extract those objects and their interactions. It is presented a general framework of object-interaction mining of large corpora. The framework is started with the initial step in extracting a single object in the unstructured document. In this study, the initial step is a pattern learning method that is applied to drug-label documents to extract drug-names. We utilize an existing external knowledge to identify a certain regular expressions surrounding the targeted object and the probabilities of that regular expression, to perform the pattern learning process. The performance of this pattern learning approach is promising to apply in this relation extraction area. As presented in the results of this study, the best f-score performance of this method is 0.78 f-score. With adjusting of some parameters and or improving the method, the performance can be potentially improved

ART HISTORY & PSYCHOANALYSIS
WORKSHOP 2
14:00- 18:00, Saturday 8 June 2013
Seminar Room 3+4
Art History Department
University College London

This event is free but registration is required.
To register, please email: artandpsychoanalysis@essex.ac.uk

14:00 – 15:00 Keynote: Prof. Janet Sayers (Psychology Department, University of Kent) Two-way traffic in art and psychoanalysis

15:00 – 15:10 Coffee and Tea

15:10 – 16:30 Maïté Marciano (Kingston University) Divergent perspectives on Magritte's Time Transfixed

Jenny Nachtigall (UCL) Techniques of recording in Dada performance and psychoanalysis

16:30 – 16:40 Short Break

16:40 – 18:00 Robert Kilroy (Trinity College Dublin) Psychoanalysis and Art History: From Parallelism to Parallax

Yasco Horsman (Leiden University) Listening to Art: On Theodor Reik’s notion of the Third Ear


http://arthistoryandpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/programme/
http://arthistoryandpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/abstracts/

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey
Extract from draft:-
Almost Crying: The ‘Doll’ in Non-Fantasy Boys’ Love
In order to understand some of the specific affordances of the fantasy genre for BL, it is useful to compare Hybrid Child with a non-fantasy BL story with the same central ‘doll’ trope. Almost Crying by Mako Takahashi was first published in Japanese in 2002 and in English in 2006. It is a one-book manga consisting of eight separate stories all set in a seemingly contemporary Japan with improbable, but non-fantastical, plots. In Celluloid Closet , Takaido has lost his beloved doll and is overjoyed to find her in the Lily -look-a-like Sakurada.
Celluloid Closet: Sakurada and Takaido
No, not just like her. He is her! Ever since my Lily mysteriously disappeared from my closet, I’ve been searching for her! This is a fated reunion! Of course I had to hug her!

Sakurada has started working in a toy shop after school. Takaido comes in every restocking day to search the shelves. Sakurada asks if he is looking for something. To Sakurada’s horror, Takaido hugs him with joy: “Lily! I’ve finally found you!” A photo reveals that Sakurada does, indeed, look very like the lost Lily-doll and the security guard finds Takaido’s bag to be stuffed with toys: “They keep me from being lonely.” Takaido begins to work at the toy shop and is very attentive to Sakurada. Sakurada is annoyed but tolerates his ministrations, although this does not include wearing a Lily outfit that Takaido brings to work. Sakurada is overjoyed when he finds that the Lily-doll is being re-released and Takaido tries to be happy when he is told the news. However, Sakurada begins to feel despondent that he was “just a substitute for the doll” and begins to cold-shoulder Takaido. Takaido forcible carries Sakurada to his house where Sakurada discovers that Takaido has already found his Lily-doll but has not stopped loving him. Sakurada then accepts that they have a relationship. However he still refuses to wear Lily clothes.
The paranoid-schizoid position – stuck in a ‘good’ place
Whereas the Hybrid Child stories can be viewed as explorations of the depressive position, Celluloid Closet can be understood as a parody of a relationship founded on the paranoid-schizoid functioning of one partner. Young children’s object relations are often facilitated by a ‘transitional object’ – usually a blanket, doll, or soft toy - which acts as an intermediary between their internal good object and developing, more realistic but also increasingly, ambivalent relationships with external whole objects (Winnicot, 1964). Older children and adults can continue to use a transitional object invested with the qualities of the ‘loved object’ to provide reassurance, required less with increasing integration of a good object within the ego. Takaido’s Lily-doll appears to be such a transitional object.
What is unusual about this scenario is that, when Takaido misplaces Lily, he transfers the projection onto a stranger with similar physical characteristics in a particularly distorting way such that “the early primitive ideal is clung to, controlled and transfixed in its primitive, all-giving form in order to avoid reality” (Likierman, 2001, p.96). This is an extreme defence against depressive integration of good and bad part-objects and Takaido wards-off the loneliness of the ‘loss of the loved object’ through clinging to paranoid-schizoid forms of relating. Sakurada at first rejects the projection, then tolerates it, and eventually is worn down by the intensity of Takaido’s passion. Circumstances provide Takaido the opportunity to mature through developing an intense relationship with a person whose agency might catalyse modification of unconscious phantasy in the direction of more reality-based relating. However, the story ends with Takaido still largely unable to distinguish Sakurada from his internal loved object and omnipotent disavowal of his separate existence.

Recent thinking has identified a viewpoint common to three Scottish thinkers influential in the fields of psychoanalysis and philosophy-Fairbairn, Macmurray and Suttie. A recent argument by Gerson (2004) concerning the political implications of a strand of Independent object relations thinking that explicitly includes Fairbairn and Suttie is reviewed and its findings described briefly. Gerson argues that this strand of thinking has its origins in the development of the welfare state. The possibility that the real origins of this viewpoint can be found in social thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment is developed here as a research question. (2005)

The goal of Buddhism is to gain enlightenment through the realization of the psychological basis of human suffering. Like other religions Buddhists undertake this goal together in a community known as the Sangha, which, includes lay practitioners, clergy, and various symbolic figures. While, the ostensible goal of the Sangha is to help Buddhists reach a state of religious epiphany, it also functions in a psychological fashion to moderate the regressive effects of group membership. This moderation allows the Sangha to facilitate individuation for its members while they maintain their group membership. In this way the Sangha provides a practical method for applying spiritual principals to relationships with others in the group and later, to the world at large. This paper will review classical and object relations views of group psychology and then apply these perspectives to the understanding of the Sangha.