Object Relations Research Articles

Aruna Object Storage

The exponential growth of scientific data has led to an increasing demand for effective data management and storage solutions. Academic computing infrastructures are often fragmented, which can make it challenging for researchers to leverage cloud-native principles and modern data analysis tools. To address this challenge, a new distributed storage platform called Aruna Object Storage (AOS) was developed. AOS is a cloud-native, scalable, and domain-agnostic object storage system that provides an S3-compatible interface for a variety of data analysis tools like Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Pandas. The system uses an underlying distributed NewSQL database to manage detailed information about its resources and can be deployed across multiple data centers for geo-redundancy. AOS is designed to support modern DataOps practices, including the adoption of FAIR principles. Resources in AOS are organized into Objects, Datasets, Collections and Projects, which represent relations of data objects. Additionally, these can be further annotated with key-value pairs called Labels and Hooks to provide additional information about the data. The system's event-driven architecture makes it easy to automate actions and enforce data validation checks, significantly improving accessibility and reproducibility of scientific results. AOS is open source and freely available via https://aruna-storage.org.

Sense and Sensibility: On the Aesthetics of Psychoanalytic Work

ABSTRACT This discussion focuses on Dr Huang’s use of the esthetic, her experience of the “ineffable” in treatment, and the limitations of spoken language in capturing affect, which are enacted in her essay. I elaborate on art as a medium that accesses unformulated experience that is known through a feeling but not yet cognized or worded, and suggest that the esthetic moment we experience via various art mediums provides a non-languaged symbolization that resonates with the echo of our primary object relations.

Stille Fragen: ein psychoanalytischer Blick auf die Identitätssuche in Ernst Weiß’ ‚Marengo‘ (1926)

The aim of the article is to present this short story as a turning point in Weiß’s literary work, as his departure from expressionist influences that ushers in his existential period. The theoretical basis for an analysis of the plot draws from psychoanalytical theories of object relations (e.g. works by Fairbairn, Guntrip, Seinfeld and others), especially in connection with the so-called schizoid personality. It is in the relationality of the disillusioned protagonist that the interpretive key is sought, a key to the departure from the expressionist cult of the individual, replaced in Weiß’s late work by a series of heroes searching for their identity.

대상관계이론 기반 프로그램 효과에 관한 메타분석

This study investigated the effectiveness of programs based on the object relations in Korea. A meta-analysis of 36 studies that met the selection criteria, and were published in Korea from January 1991 to March 2022, was conducted. The total effect size was 1.21, and the effect sizes of adolescents, early adulthood, and parents were 1.20, 1.57, and 1.15, all of which were confirmed to be large. Among the measurement variables of early adulthood, the effect size was large in depression, suicidal thoughts, parental roles, relationships, and parental attitudes. A moderator analysis of the subgroups in early adulthood showed that the effect size was greater when participants were special situations, for relation, for programs with more than 9 sessions, group members were less than 10. Based on the results, the limitations of the study and directions for future research were also discussed.

The curse of the thinking woman: Encoded misogyny in the brilliant female detective

AbstractThe enormously popular contemporary genre of televised police procedurals that feature a brilliant female detective reflects and reifies enduring misogynistic beliefs and attitudes that pervade the cultural fantasies and social mores of our time. In her current form, the prototypical female protagonist of these series adheres to a rigid, stereotypical formulation that limits her capacity for mature, healthy object relations. In particular, her singular devotion to her work badly compromises her maternal function: thus, she is either barren or a bad mother, as well as a bad partner, sister, or daughter. Moreover, her professional excellence is itself pathologized, as the very qualities that make her extraordinary are typically attributable to the quintessential misogynistic trope of mental illness or emotional instability. The Greek myth of the birth of Athena explicates the threat embodied by the brilliant female detective, who, as a revival of the infantile fantasy of the all‐powerful, all‐knowing mother, infringes on the generative capacity of the mind: territory that men have since antiquity claimed in order to guard against envy of female procreative power. In return, she must be divested of her uniquely female powers, “the curse of the thinking woman.”

3D detection transformer: Set prediction of objects using point clouds

Object detection in 3D scenes rely on two main methods: detection based on proposals (two-stage detectors) or detections based on anchors (single-stage detectors), similar to approaches for object detection in 2D. In this paper, we propose the 3DeTR framework that produces 3D detections without the use of anchors or proposals, allowing training of the entire neural network in an end-to-end manner. Raw point cloud scenes are augmented and input into distance-and-reflectiveness-based feature extractor to produce representative points. Then, a transformer encoder–decoder module learns the local object relations and global context to generate parallel detections, which are then passed to a set-based loss function to map predictions to the set of ground truth labels uniquely. The model’s architecture produces 3D detections by regressing directly with the set of ground truths without the need for anchors or proposals, which are bottlenecks for object detection performances. We tested the framework on the KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite 3D object detection dataset, achieving results on par with the state-of-the-art: 80.37 AP on Cars (Moderate) class and 47.92 AP on Pedestrians (Moderate) class.

A Cross-Sectional Study on Outcomes of Hospitalization in Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder After Six Months

Background: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a serious psychiatric disorder that is characterized by unstable affect, mood, behavior, object relations, and self-image. In this study, a 6-month follow-up was performed to evaluate the outcomes of hospitalization in terms of symptoms severity, suicidal attempts, self-harm behaviors, substance use, and anger expression.
 Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 60 patients hospitalized with BPD in Iran Psychiatric Hospital in the first 6 months of 2018. Demographic information of patients was collected at the time of admission. Patients were assessed by initial psychiatric evaluations with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV [Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-1), Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Disorders (SCID-2)], the Borderline Evaluation of Severity over Time (BEST), the Spielberger’s state-trait anger expression inventory and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS). Medical comorbidities, self-harm and suicide ideations and attempts, high-risk behaviors, and substance use disorders were also assessed and recorded. Three months after discharge, the patients were reassessed by BEST questionnaire and after 6 months, they were reassessed using DASS, BEST, SCID-2, and Spielberger’s state-trait anger expression inventory.
 Results: The repeated measures analysis of changes in quantitative variables including the scores of the severity of symptoms in BEST, DASS, and Spielberger tools showed that the scores of DASS decreased significantly during the study (p=0.020), while no significant change was observed in the scores of Spielberger and BEST inventory.
 Conclusion: In patients with BPD, hospitalization was correlated with reduced depression, anxiety, and stress 6 months after discharge. Regular follow-ups along with regular patient visits can form an effective therapeutic relationship with the patients and help to improve monitoring of their drug usage, self-harming acts, and suicidal thoughts.

Preliminary psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the structured interview of personality organization (STIPO-CH)

BackgroundKernberg originally proposed the psychoanalytic concept of personality organization (PO), which measures personality pathology from a dimensional approach with multiple scales and can be evaluated using the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO) from six domains: identity, object relations, primitive defenses, coping vs. rigidity, aggression, and moral values. The present study translated the original version into the Chinese STIPO (STIPO-CH) version and evaluated its reliability and validity.MethodsThe STIPO-CH was administered to 49 non-clinical subjects. They also completed the Chinese version of the Inventory of Personality Organization and the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory to evaluate criterion-related reliability. Interrater reliability was assessed with intraclass correlations. An item analysis was carried out to explore the structure and internal consistency.ResultsInterrater reliability (intraclass correlations) ranged from 0.98 to 0.99. Results suggested acceptable internal consistency for identity and moral values. The correlations between STIPO-CH domains and self-report questionnaires indicated that construct validity and criterion-related validity were acceptable to good.ConclusionsOverall, this study presents preliminary psychometric properties of STIPO-CH. Limitations regarding the sample, interviewers, and cultural differences are discussed. Future research is highly recommended.

A Robust Pixel-Wise Prediction Network With Applications to Industrial Robotic Grasping

Accurate object detection and 6D pose estimation are the key technologies in robotic grasping applications, where efficiency and robustness are the two most desirable goals. Especially for textureless industrial parts, it is difficult for most existing methods to extract robust image features from cluttered scenarios with heavy occlusion. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pixel-wise prediction strategy using local features to infer global information based on the inherent local-global relations of rigid objects. This strategy is robust to missing or disturbed local information since each pixel has an independent prediction, and the dense prediction manner can mitigate the instability caused by outliers. Accordingly, we first generate dense pixel-wise predictions of the object category, center, and keypoint from image features extracted by an encoder-decoder network. Then, these predictions are used to vote on and identify the keypoint locations of the specific instance object, and finally, the poses are estimated from the keypoints by an uncertainty <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PnP</i> (Perspective-n-Point) algorithm. Experiments on various scenarios are implemented to illustrate the advantages of our approach on severe industrial scenes, and a robotic grasping platform is constructed to evaluate its application performance.

The Effectiveness of Detecting Thematic Relations of Objects in 3–6 Year Old Children

The Effectiveness of Detecting Thematic Relations of Objects in 3–6 Year Old Children

Video Action Recognition by Combining Spatial-Temporal Cues with Graph Convolutional Networks

Video action recognition relies heavily on the way spatio-temporal cues are combined in order to enhance recognition accuracy. This issue can be addressed with explicit modeling of interactions among objects within or between videos, such as the graph neural network, which has been shown to accurately model and represent complicated spatial- temporal object relations for video action classification. However, the visual objects in the video are diversified, whereas the nodes in the graphs are fixed. This may result in information overload or loss if the visual objects are too redundant or insufficient for graph construction. Segment level graph convolutional networks (SLGCNs) are proposed as a method for recognizing actions in videos. The SLGCN consists of a segment-level spatial graph and a segment-level temporal graph, both of which are capable of simultaneously processing spatial and temporal information. Specifically, the segment-level spatial graph and the segment-level temporal graph are constructed using 2D and 3D CNNs to extract appearance and motion features from video segments. Graph convolutions are applied in order to obtain informative segment-level spatial-temporal features. A variety of challenging video datasets, such as EPIC-Kitchens, FCVID, HMDB51 and UCF101, are used to evaluate our method. In experiments, it is demonstrated that the SLGCN can achieve performance comparable to the state-of-the-art models in terms of obtaining spatial-temporal features.

Without memory, desire, or sex: contemplating the incel identity

This article proposes a psychoanalytic exploration and interpretation of the incel identity. Through a reading of Melanie Klein's object relations theory and with a particular focus on the theories of Wilfred Bion, the evolution of the incel identity is conceptualised as a product of failed containment and delayed development of a mature psychic mechanism for thinking, firmly rooted in the paranoid–schizoid position. The incel's relationship with women is shown to be characterised by a dependence on psychotic processes and defence mechanisms, and the article concludes with a discussion on the individual's relationship to the incel internet subculture as a basic assumption group. These interpretations are made with reference to examples taken from the transcript of a final video manifesto recorded by a notorious incel prior to his infamous act of fatal misogynistic violence.

Evaluation of urine cotinine levels in children with chronic cough

Bacground: Our study was planned to reveal the objective relation between urine cotinine level and tobacco smoke exposure in children suffering from chronic cough.&#x0D; Methods: Between ages 5-18 years, 58 patients with chronic cough with no underlying specific cause and 54 healthy individuals were included in the study. &#x0D; Results: There was a statistically significant difference between urine cotinine levels of cases those who exposed and unexposed (based on the declaration of parents) to tobacco smoke (p

Pragmatism or idealism: a systematic review and visual analysis of Winnicott's psychoanalytical treatment views.

Winnicott is an outstanding representative of the School of Object Relations, and his unique psychoanalytic treatment views have been greatly influential to the psychoanalytical community. Winnicott emphasizes the impact of facilitating environment and the key role of the maternal-child relationship in the early psychological growth of individuals. He puts forward the ideas of the development mechanism of the true self and the false self, which builds a bridge between the characteristics of adult psychopathology and the characteristics of early maternal-child relationships, providing a new perspective for research on individual self-development and psychoanalysis. Winnicott creatively introduces the concepts of the transitional object and the transitional phenomena into the theories of Object Relations. He relates the transitional experience to the field of mental health, and extends it from the relationship between the mother and the child to adult life, which not only has had a revolutionary impact on modern psychoanalysis but also literature, aesthetics, and other fields. Winnicott highlights the importance of the patient's emotional development in the treatment. He advocates holding the patients' sentiments and meeting their emotional needs. He also approves of the emotional reparenting of the patients, to make them gain the ability to establish a relationship with the real world. His treatment views formed through a large number of clinical practices are very practical and full of humanistic care. This review summarizes Winnicott's psychoanalytical treatment views as well as his marvelous original concepts, and analyzes the hot topics of academic research on his theories based on a visualization analysis by using the software CiteSpace, which includes data in the Web of Science Core Collection published from 1978 to 2023 with 365 papers involved. The study provides a macroscopic and panoramic review of Winnicott's theories, and it clearly shows Winnicott's significant influence on the field of psychoanalysis and related fields.

Borderline personality - from psychoanalysis to epigenetics. Biological basis of attachment.

In terms of object relations theory, borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by a structural abnormality of identity, conflicting representations of self and others, and disorganization of attachment - a construct rooted in an individual's early experiences and central to the relationships established later in life. A special role in the formation of attachment style is attributed to the relationship with the caregiver and to difficult experiences or traumas from early developmental stages. These experiences not only provide the psychological basis for the development of an insecure attachment style, but also leave a biological mark in the body in the form of epigenetic modifications. Although research on epigenetic modifications in BPD is scarce, a growing body of evidence supports the importance of oxytocin - the "social peptide" underlying attachment - in the etiology of BPD. We believe that the study of epigenetic modifications that affect the action of oxytocin in the BPD clinical population will provide a better understanding of the basis and process of development of the disorder, as well as provide a therapeutic direction to work effectively in the major areas of BPD.

The Role of Early Trauma in the Formation of Belief in Reptilian Conspiracy Theories: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

This paper investigates whether conspiracy theories arising during the COVID‐19 pandemic are linked to early trauma or a specific organization of the mind. Using the Reptilian conspiracy theory as an example, the paper proposes that belief in conspiracy theories can activate unresolved memories of trauma and serve as a mediator between the psyche and intrusive content. Classic psychoanalytic concepts, as well as more modern ideas from Britton and Steiner, are explored to understand the role of early trauma and inner object relations dynamics in the development of Belief in Reptilian Conspiracy Theories (BiCT). The concept of après‐coup is introduced to explain how newer responses to familiar psychic experiences may shape beliefs in conspiracies. Additionally, the paper proposes that belief in conspiracy theories can function as a psychic retreat. Two clinical cases are presented to illustrate these ideas while maintaining anonymity.

Art therapy postcards:

This research article draws on a master’s thesis. Inherited perpetrator trauma may result from a family legacy of past familial collaboration with the South African apartheid regime. This historical narrative emerges from a familial relationship with the artist Irmin Henkel, the author’s step-grandfather. Henkel was known as the official portrait painter of the 1960s apartheid regime Cabinet. A heuristic self-study and arts-based approach were used to create a five-step protocol that art therapists can use to treat inherited perpetrator trauma. The approach used postcards as an art therapy tool. I repurposed family photographs into postcards to engage with the past. I also wrote reflective narratives. Inherited perpetrator trauma theories were used. A dialectical thinking approach was used that considers more than one perspective. Three main themes emerged: guilt, denial, and toxic shame. The creation of postcards from historical family narratives successfully uncovered the themes. The protocol has not been tested beyond the self-study. However, the use of museum spaces and the theory of object relations is considered in this article. Making toxic shame conscious and confronting and transforming this trauma can prevent a repeat of past historical transgressions and encourage healthier relationships to self, family, community and a broader South African society.

Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock

Kilmartin Glen’s rock art and built structures suggest activities dedicated to decentring human individuality and agency, paradoxically through heightened sensory experience. This process of “losing oneself” in time and place may be understood in terms of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), rejecting subject–object relationships in favour of a “flat ontology” of object–object relations in which life or sentience receives no privileged status. OOO’s explication of metaphor, rooted in a schema of essence and appearance, and further supported by cognitive linguistics, serves as a basis for erasing not only the distinction between the literal and metaphorical but also, with additional consideration of the implicate order as described by physicist David Bohm, the organic and inorganic. Taken together, these approaches allow us to understand ritual activity involving music and contact with “dead” stone at astronomically significant moments as a method of “attunement” to the continuity between terrestrial/celestial and animate/inanimate, consistent with contemporary efforts to reconcile classical and quantum physics as it confronts the subjunctive nature of reality itself.

Transference

ABSTRACT The article presents a view of transference from the early versions of transference by Classical/Structural analysts, through a variety of analytic positions that extend and implicitly question the concept of transference. After looking at Brenner and Bird's transference positions, we trace the beginning of relational analysis as articulated by Gill. The differences among several subsequent relational positions are then explicated. Self-Psychology is conceptualized as providing a clarification of Freud's view of narcissism leading to a new perspective on narcissistic transference states. The article concludes by detailing Contemporary Freudian concepts that integrate various object relation positions within an overriding Freudian theoretical structure. The Contemporary Freudian positions in some ways mirror Ogden's attempts to integrate diverse positions.

Changes in dreams - the development of a dream-transformation scale in psychoanalyses with chronically depressed, early traumatized patients

ABSTRACT As is well known, dreams are still seen as via regia to the unconscious by many psychodynamic and psychoanalytic clinicians and researchers. Therefore, this article reports on decades of efforts to understand changes in manifest dreams in psychodynamic therapies as indicators for relevant, sustaining transformations in the inner object world of patients and to use them in comparative psychotherapy outcome studies. An empirical psychotherapy study by Leuzinger-Bohleber has described the following changes in manifest dream during successful psychoanalyses: reduction of nightmares, widening of the affective spectrum, increase of successful problemsolving, fewer observer dreams and more mature object relations. These transformations are illustrated in a detailed case report of a chronically depressed, early traumatized patient of the LAC Depression Study. In the next section the results of a systematic focused literature review aiming to identify suitable instruments for the study of dreams are presented. Finally, we discuss which conclusions can be drawn for the development of a dream transformation scale capturing changes in manifest dreams in psychodynamic therapies with depressive patients. Such a scale would be an important methodological addition for future comparative psychotherapy outcome studies, since it takes into account dreams, as a genuinely psychoanalytic criterion for psychic transformations.