Breathing together: Needed relationships and complex selfobjects

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper the author extends his metatheory of needed relationships to posit a more complex form of selfobject connection than has been previously theorized. He argues that there are degrees of selfobject connectedness and that for the fullest, most transformative connection to be actualized certain conditions in the patient’s experience of the analyst need to be met. The co-creation of such conditions amounts to a new needed relationship—a transformational intersubjective medium—uniquely co-created and unpredictably emergent within each analytic dyad, which somehow comes to address a traumatic relational breach in the original parent-child field and restores an ethic of care, lawfulness, competence and love that was the patient’s original birthright. This amounts to a fully relational self psychology, but a more forward edge relationality than that of mainstream Relational theory, which, at least historically, has placed more emphasis on repetition and enactment than on what the author calls the needed relationship.