Main description:

Using Winnicott's classic paper as its starting point, this fascinating collection explores a range of clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic perspectives around relating to "the object." Each author approaches the topic from a different angle, switching among the patient's use of others in their internal and external lives, their use of their therapist, and the therapist's own use of their patients.

The use of objects is susceptible to wide interpretation and elaboration; it is both a normal phenomenon and a marker for certain personal difficulties, or even psychopathologies, seen in clinical practice. While it is normal for people to relate to others through the lens of their internal objects in ways that give added meaning to aspects of their lives, it becomes problematic when people live as if devoid of a self and instead live almost exclusively through the others who form their internal worlds, often leading them to feel that they cannot be happy until and unless others change.

Assessing the significance of objects among adult and child patients, groups and the group-as-object, and exploring Freud's own use of objects, The Use of the Object in Psychoanalysis will be of significant interest both to experienced psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and to trainees exploring important theoretical questions.

Contents:

Introduction

David E. Scharff

Chapter 1

David E. Scharff

Living Through Objects

Chapter 2

Jim Poulton

What Does the Other (in Our Patients' Lives) Have to Do with It?

Chapter 3

Carl Bagnini

Dreaming Up, Re-Finding, and Grieving Lost Objects: A Case Study

Chapter 4

Caroline Sehon

Illuminating the Shadows of the Object World

Chapter 5

Nancy Bakalar

Analysis Interminable: The Analyst's Self as Object for the Patient

Chapter 6

Ron Aviram

Can an Ingroup be an Internal Object: Explorations of the Social Object Representation Concept

Chapter 7

Juan Tubert-Oklander

Beyond Subject and Object or Why Object-Usage Is Not a Good Idea

Chapter 8

Jill Savege Scharff

The Internal Object in Self and Other

Epilogue

David Scharff