Selfobject Experience Research Articles

Reply to Kottler

ABSTRACT The author appreciates Kottler’s suspension of her own theoretical framework in order more fully to enter and grasp his framework. He finds his theory of needed relationships/complex selfobjects and hers of twinship/alterego selfobject experience to be compatible if it is recognized that the two sets of constructs represent two different categories of analytic theorizing: what the author terms “holistic” vs. “categorical” constructs. Holistic theories and constructs pertain to the analytic relationship as a whole whereas categorical theories and constructs describe particular dimensions of that relationship. He argues that the major concepts of his model—the needed relationship, fittedness, specificity of recognition and specificity of connection—are all holistic constructs whereas twinship and alterego transference phenomena are categorical in that they refer to particular dimensions of certain treatments. The author’s concept of complex selfobject experience is also a categorical construct but “moves in the direction of” a holistic construct. Finally, the author is in full agreement with Kottler that our theories and ways of working need to take into account and address the realities of otherness and difference between ourselves and our patients in such a way that our patients feel met, understood and fully welcome in the analytic space.

Courageous leaps: Discussion of Heather MacIntosh’s paper “Practicing in a time of covid loss and threat”

ABSTRACT Heather MacIntosh’s emotionally moving paper describes an intense relation with a patient at a time when Heather herself was traumatized. This analyst-patient relationship inspired Heather to make essential changes in her lifestyle. These changes were curative for both the analyst and the patient. The discussion highlights three main issues. The first is leaps from the analytic frame, Different forms of leaps, starting with those defined by Freud and continuing with current analysts, demonstrate various modifications of the frame. The second issue is the question of who is responsible for the transformation of trauma. When the analyst remains faithful to her ideals, she can be inspired by a vast range of idealized selfobjects, human and nonhuman. The perception of an idealized selfobject is neither dependent on external conditions nor on actual actions. The patient can then expand her mind in a similar way. The third issue focuses on the expansion of the scope of selfobject experiences in times of turbulence and stress. We may consider that in such times the mind can be inspired by the selfobject function of nature, art, imagination and virtual possibilities. In our times, universality and interconnectedness fulfill a major role in informing our lives. Our minds are constituted by a global ecology that shapes our subjectivity.

A Space Odyssey: The Impact of Changing the Physical Aspects of the Analytic Setting on the Analyst, the Patient and Their Relationship

ABSTRACT The re-modeling of my consulting room space, as a senior analyst became a transformative process. Through clinical examples that traverse themes of envy, pleasure in the new, loss of the familiar and privileging my subjectivity, the influence of the altered physical setting on my patients, myself, and our relationship is examined. Conceptualizations of my professional home as nest, matricial space, holding environment and selfobject experience are considered along with examples of evocative physical objects in relational and developmental contexts. This nourishing space became a sanctuary while working virtually during the pandemic.

Is This My Home? How Psychoanalytic Training Led to My Cultural Reawakening

ABSTRACT In this paper, I reflect on how cultural selfobject experiences shape one’s sense of identity and how contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved in order to recognize the impact of extra psychic factors on emotional development. I use my personal experience as a Jewish, first-generation daughter of immigrants to focus on culture, fantasied whiteness, intergenerational transmission of the trauma of immigration, and the role of dissociation in formation of identity. I also elaborate on how an expanded psychoanalytic theory and practice that includes the socio-cultural as part of the relational field has helped me to understand how these experiences become internalized.

A triadic developmental system: Implications of infant research for couples treatment

ABSTRACT This paper extends concepts from infant research and intersubjective systems theory to couples treatment. Infant research views human development as taking place in a two-person developmental system, in which the caregiver and the infant coordinate to foster infant development. Couples treatment is by analogy seen as a three person developmental system. Systems based psychoanalytic theories are applied to the couple/therapist system, particularly in regard to the oscillation between hoped-for selfobject experiences and feared repetitive experiences. Infant research has shown that the origin of our sense of self, others, and self-with-others emerges from the ongoing, largely nonverbal, dialogue between infants and caregivers. The attachment security from infancy is reorganized by adult relationships. The therapist looks to help partners (1) repair disruptions when they occur, (2) recognize each other and in turn feel recognized and (3) have greater ability to reflect or mentalize on their partner’s and their own mental states. The “back and forth weave” of the therapist’s attention is shown to have particular salience in fostering development. The paper concludes with a case example of how a single look or expression disrupts the couples enjoyment of an anticipated day.

초기 성인의 자기대상경험과 건강한 자기애의 관계에서 공감지각과 자기위로능력의 매개효과

Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between young adults’ self-object experience and healthy narcissism, the structural relationship between empathy perception and self-soothing that was explored, and which paths each variable formed healthy narcissism through.
 Methods For this purpose, an online survey was conducted on adults aged 19 to 39 across the country, and data of a total from 533 people (233 men and 300 women) were analyzed. Descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, and mediating effect analysis were conducted using SPSS 25 and MPLUS 8.6 (Muthén & Mutén, 1998-2014) to estimate the relationship between each variable.
 Results The results of the study are as follows. First, positive correlations between self-empathy, healthy narcissism, empathy perception, and self-soothing ability were all significant. Second, there was no significant mediation effect of empathy perception on the relationship between self-object experience and healthy narcissism. Third, there was a significant mediation effect of self-soothing ability on the relationship between self-object experience and health narcissism. Fourth, the single mediation effect of empathy perception on the relationship between self-object experience and healthy narcissism was found insignificant, however, sequential double mediation of self-object experience through empathy perception and self-soothing ability on healthy narcissism was significant.
 Conclusions Based on Kohut’s self psychology, these results suggest that empathy perception and self-soothing ability play the role of procedural variables in the relationship between self-object experience and healthy narcissism. Therefore, in order to form healthy narcissism, the direction to intervene in various scenes such as education site, workplace, and counseling, and the need to provide educational materials and programs were confirmed.

How creating art sustained me during the pandemic

ABSTRACT In this paper, I describe how my painting practice restored and sustained a more coherent and vitalized sense of self during the isolation, loneliness and sense of unrealness, dislocation, and lost world order brought about by Covid. I describe how the intersubjective and physical process of painting, and the nonverbal, embodied experience of creating art re-situated me in a world that felt real and allowed me to know and reflect on emotional experiences not available verbally until represented in visual, concrete form. I present a brief clinical example to illustrate how my artistic practice during Covid decisively informed an appreciation of the importance of a co-constructed selfobject experience that recognized how essential a patient’s own affirmed creativity was for enhancing her sense of vitality, agency, and possibility of positive change.

A Psychoanalytic Lens: Unmasked Layers of the Self among Post-Graduate Psychology Students in Surviving the COVID-19 Lockdown

The World Health Organisation (WHO) classified the Sars-Cov-2, also identified as COVID-19, as a pandemic on the 12th of March 2020 (Qiu et al., 2020), with South Africa recording its first case on the 5th of March 2020. The rapidly spreading virus led the South African government to implement one of the strictest, nationwide lockdowns globally, resulting in the closing down of all institutions of higher learning effective March 18th 2020. Thus, this qualitative study primarily aimed to explore whether post-graduate psychology students were in a state of a depleted or cohesive self, post the psychological isolation of COVID-19 risk-adjusted level 5 lockdown. Semi-structured interviews from a qualitative interpretive approach comprising N = 6 psychology post-graduate students, facilitated a rich understanding of their intra-psychic experiences of the self. Thematic analysis of data gathered from the interviews illuminated how students were forced into the self by the emotional isolation of hard lockdown, with the emergence of core psychic conflict often defended against, through external self-object experiences. The findings also suggest that lockdown stripped off this sample of psychology post-graduate students’ defensive escape from the inner self through external self-object distractions. The external self was stripped to the core of the internal self by the isolation of hard lockdown, thereby uncovering the psychic function of roles and defenses amalgamated throughout modern cultural consciousness that dictate self-functioning. The study suggests modelling reflexivity skills in the integration of internal and external self-experience dynamics as part of a training model for continued personal and professional development for psychology students.

Destruction, survival and the use of the clinician: Preserving opportunities for selfobject experience in work with challenging patients

ABSTRACT Many patients resist engagement in the therapeutic relationship because they fear the traumatic consequences of the mobilization of thwarted selfobject needs in what they fear will be a faulty, nonempathic environment. At times this resistance is manifest in “narcissistic rage” as described by Heinz Kohut. Providing opportunities for selfobject experience in work with these patients can be challenging. In his 1971 paper The Use of the Object, D.W. Winnicott described a developmental process in which the state of omnipotent merger with important objects undergoes a transformation in which the other is increasingly recognized as not only outside the self, but also in possession of a subjectivity of its own and thus can be made use of. In work with some seriously and persistently mentally ill, the client’s capacity to make use of the clinician is poorly developed or highly conflicted. Given this the clinical process in which the client achieves the recognition of the worker and trust in their intentions—and hence can make use of them as a selfobject, is often prolonged and stormy. A case is discussed at length that illustrates this. The report documents the importance of holding, containment, management of the countertransference, and survival strategies for the clinician. It also shows the patient’s growing ability to make use of the clinician as a selfobject as she struggles to understand and cope with changes in her life world and self-experience.

Field Instruction: A Relational Model to Promote A Positive Professional Identity for Social Work Students

ABSTRACT The development of a social work professional identity is an element of social work education. It is not clear how students in social work programs develop this identity; its development seems to be dependent on the integration of various learning experiences and exposure to curriculum content in the classroom, and in the fieldwork assignments. Teachers and field instructors play important roles in this process. In this paper, the authors argue that a positive professional social work identity can be fostered through the relationship with instructors in fieldwork supervision. Using Kohut’s theory of Self Psychology, the authors present a model that highlights the application of the concept of self-object needs to the field instructor-student relationship. One of the central premises of his theory is that individuals from childhood and throughout adulthood internalize the experiences provided by self-objects to meet the emotional needs of the self. The authors propose that field instructors provide self-object experiences that can sustain and foster the development of a positive professional identity for social work students in training. The application of this model underscores students’ affective changes associated with students’ professional development in social work programs.

The psychological impact of an unreliable father on his son and on the family: Therapeutic interventions with the child and within the family system

ABSTRACT This paper explores the impact of an erratic, unreliable and toxic father on the psychological development of his son, Nicola, an eight-year-old boy, who, lacking an empathic selfobject experience with his father, developed emotional dysregulated reactions and aggressive behaviors. The clinical report shows how the child communicated his distress through such behaviors with his mother, at school, and in the therapy sessions. The pervasive affective presence of the father, notwithstanding his unpredictability and substantial absence, reverberated on the family system, because the mother’ ambivalence towards him was a source of conflict and confusion for Nicola. Play therapy and additional family meetings created the emotional space to process the feelings haunting the child and nourishing his anger and confusion. The mother had created the image of an unapproachable father and denied the child pain and resentment for his absence. Therefore, Nicola did not understand his anger and disappointment towards his father, and even less his continuously frustrated need to be close to him. The clinical report of the therapeutic play interactions between analyst and child centers on an impasse and its eventual resolution which stimulated change in the whole family system. Child treatment requires attention to the entire family as a condition for the child to work through his affective experience via symbolic play and, for the mother to acquire a healthy limit setting and emotional responsiveness to her son’s affective experience.

Spiritual Transformation of Han: Four Levels of Transference in Self Psychology.

The purpose of this article is to research han (an oppressed feeling in Korea) through spiritual approaches including self psychology. Han is an oppressive feeling in Korean society. This han, caused by splitting, can be a place for the beginning of healing. One can invest one's instinctual energy in the right place in the feeble self, according to one's deepest needs there, in that spot of fragility. Many Koreans have been suffering from a deceptive self-image and do not feel deserving of love or care because of the vicious han-ridden circle. If Koreans can attain healthy self-object experiences, they will no longer feel fragility in themselves.

The application of contemporary self psychology to couple psychotherapy

This article summarises what the author sees as contemporary self psychology's main contributions to understanding and treating couples. The concepts of selfobject experience and needs, the "forward edge" of even very dysfunctional behaviour, and the centrality of the sense of self, add to our understanding of couples and the reasons for their difficulties. In addition, the theory's emphasis on listening from the patient's point of view, empathic attunement, viewing the therapist as a source of selfobject experience for the patient, close attention to narcissistic vulnerability and the rupture and repair sequence, and a collaborative, experiencenear interpretive process are all at least as useful in couple treatment as they are in individual treatment. From this perspective, the goal of couple therapy is to improve the partners' abilities to function as a reliable source of attuned selfobject experience for each other by targeting the various factors that interfere with their doing so, detailed in this article. The article also proposes that in some cases, psychoeducation, coaching, or suggestions can be experienced by the partners as attuned selfobject responses and/or can facilitate such responses between them, and thus can be appropriately part of a fundamentally psychoanalytic couple treatment.

Twinship In An Unpeopled World

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the experience of lockdown during Covid-19 confronts us with ourselves. Isolation, feeling trapped or afraid, the sudden absence of the presence of others, opens painful windows into past experiences of thwarted selfobject experiences. Kohut’s conceptualization of selfobject needs and transferences that pose on-going questions about the meanings we make of emotional experience throughout life are newly considered. In an unpeopled world, is it possible to discover leading edge blossomings within ourselves and our patients? Twinship and the notion of an attuned receiver are emphasized.

The Emerging Paradigm of Relational Self Psychology: An Historical Perspective

ABSTRACT This article describes the evolution of a critical dimension of self psychology that has evolved since Heinz Kohut’s death, one characterized by the transition from a one-person to a two-person psychology. This transition involved, initially, the change in the analyst’s role as limited to interpreting the patient’s intrapsychically generated selfobject experiences of development, rupture, and repair, to an emergence into full personhood; second, a new emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity participating in a bi-directional relationship of mutuality rather than a unidirectional provision of needed functions; and finally, an overall approach to the therapeutic process as a complex, dynamic system. This emergent paradigm within self psychology we term relational self psychology. We illustrate its evolution through a historical review of critical papers that extended and transformed Kohut’s original vision, which already contained the seeds of a genuinely intersubjective and relational model. We outline these changes in four sections: (I) “Empathy and Beyond,” detailing the concept’s evolution within Kohut’s writing and its subsequent elaboration; (II) “From Provision to Mutuality,” describing the movement beyond Kohut’s focus on understanding and explaining and the mutative force of optimal frustration; (III) “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” discussing infant research emphasizing face-to-face interaction and mutual regulation moving into the development of a truly bi-directional model of therapeutic action; and finally, (IV) “From Dyads to Systems,” integrating self psychology into a broader intersubjective, relational, dynamic system and theoretical context. Each section concludes with a bibliography of seminal-related articles that may offer a syllabus for further study.

Fabulousness – What the Doctor Ordered: Exploring the Intrapsychic Significance and Social Meanings of Fashion

Fashion is simultaneously intensely personal and very public. We can use fashion as an external ego support when our inner self-representation needs propping up. Yet, the moment we put on a particular outfit, that clothing becomes a cultural artifact. Looking through a self-psychology lens, this article examines how clothing and fashion can be tools for promoting self-cohesion, while simultaneously exploring how the subjective experience of fashion is influenced by one’s larger societal context. Case material and excerpts from nonfiction writing allow for an examination of the felt experience of fashion and self-presentation. Fashion provides a wealth of opportunities for enlivening selfobject experiences, which may be sparked by the material, physical nature of clothes; the communicative function of fashion; or the imaginative act of self-styling. Drawing on Madison Moore’s concept of “fabulousness,” an embodied, queer esthetic that uses fashion for both self-realization and resisting oppression, this article concludes with a discussion of creativity and social change. Fashion is a tool not just for communicating the self, but for creating a self—often in deliberate resistance to destructive forces, whether those are social or interpersonal.

Gilgamesh: The First Tragic Man

ABSTRACT Studying myths with psychoanalytic understanding is an attempt as old as psychoanalysis itself. Being the oldest written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh narrates the heroic journeys and the desperate search for the immortality of Sumerian semi-legendary king, Gilgamesh. In the present article, the main themes of the epic, comprising fellowship and fear of death, were analysed through self-psychological concepts of twinship selfobject needs and the transformations of narcissism. One of the major schools of psychoanalysis, self-psychology, investigates and understands human experiences from the perspective of selfobject experiences in which the psychological functions of selfobjects are utilized to preserve cohesiveness, vitality, and harmony of the self as extensively described by Heinz Kohut and other self-psychologists.

The Selfobject Concept: The Heart of Kohut’s Psychology of Health

ABSTRACTKohut’s creation of the selfobject concept marks a point of departure for psychoanalysis—the moment when analysts began to shift their attention away from intrapsychic relationships and toward relational experiences, conscious and unconscious, that are key to understanding psychological development, psychopathology, and psychological treatment. While he continued to speak of the intrapsychic consequences of selfobject experience, Kohut’s concept of selfobject experience was and remains a relational concept, as it links self experience to the relational contexts in which self experience comes into being or is transformed. The selfobject concept brings into view the functional capacity one person may have to bring dimensions (or potential dimensions) of another person into being; it is singularly important, for it underscores our inescapable relational embeddedness. Selfobject experience describes a universal dimension of relationship, one that is key to treatment for many reasons, among them its relationship to transference. Clinical examples will illustrate selfobject experiences and varieties of selfobject transferences.

LEARNING FROM BRISBANE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND THE PROMISE OF EMPATHY

Psychoanalysis has no shortage of theorists who see psychoanalysis as unique and who regard efforts to draw from academic disciplines as fanciful. Contemporary self psychology has been comparatively more receptive to adjacent disciplines. This paper discusses what self psychology can learn from the field of literary criticism about addressing the experience of political and social otherness. Using the debates arising from the 2017 Brisbane Literary Festival, it will explore how social, political, and cultural identities might affect our ability to understand the lives of those whose identities we do not share. It explores the historical reluctance of psychoanalysis to address issues of identity and otherness in theory and clinical practice, as well as the importance of the “relational turn” in overcoming these theoretical limitations. The paper will explore aspects of self psychology, including the empathic listening stance and specificity theory, that help the mental health profession avoid the central literary challenges raised in the Brisbane debates and will suggest that some of Kohut’s central ideas about selfobject experience may need to be revised or elaborated more fully to address the clinical and policy implications of engaging with political, social, and cultural otherness especially when it entails devaluation.

SELF-AGENCY: FREEDOM AND CONTEXT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

In this paper, I argue that awareness of and the capacity for personal agency is at the heart of self-experience, and I explore how this agentic self emerges from social interactions, especially selfobject experience. I then illustrate ways in which self-agency can be derailed, disrupted, and even usurped. Finally, I examine the implications of these findings for clinical psychoanalytic practice. There is a paradox at the heart of my thesis – every human being is ineluctably embedded in his or her environment, especially the social environment, and his or her existence, psychologically and physically, is inconceivable outside this context. At the same time, it is this environmental system that gives rise to the capacity for freedom and self-agency.