The Use of the Object in Psychoanalysis

An Object Relations Perspective on the Other

David E. Scharff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367189167
• eBook ISBN: 9780429581458
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

1 Living in the object

David E. Scharff

To discuss patients who live their emotional lives by what I have come to call “living in the objects,” I began by re-reading Winnicott’s (1971) article from Playing and Reality, “The use of an object and relating through identifications.” This is not an easy article, because what he says is that object relating comes first and begins when the infant is in a merged state with the mother. Then it is through the destruction of the object and yet having the object survive that destructive set of acts toward the object that the other person becomes real for the infant. It then becomes possible for the infant to use the object in a set of real relationships between two subjects. In this way, Winnicott puts destruction at the center of the growth of a capacity to form emotional relationships between two people, each of whom has his or her own autonomous inner lives and who then relate to each other across what he defined a potential or transitional space through the use of transitional phenomena.

Destruction of the merged object is therefore at the center of his postulation of a developmental sequence toward mutual relating. This growth in capacity to use the object is at the center of a maturational line that has to do with the capacity to relate to somebody else with what Winnicott called a capacity for concern, his language for Melanie Klein’s depressive position.

In thinking about the idea of “the use of the object,” I realized that I had something else in mind, an elaboration of one part of Winnicott’s paradigm. I want to explore the way in which our patients, and people in general, use the idea of another person for their own purposes. Of course, everybody does this in health and illness, but some of our patients come to us through the particular mental mechanism of using the image of another person as a long-term substitute for a sense of having an inner life of their own.

This idea came to me many years ago through experience with a patient who I came to feel had a sense of being alive only when talking about his wife. His wife was a wealthy woman, whose wealth was inherited and not the fruit of her own work or of his, and who lived in a world of excess. She shopped tirelessly and spent excessively. She used the sense of whether he was willing to indulge her, as her father had indulged her before him, as the sign of whether he loved her and obeyed her – or not.

Notice that I have introduced this man mainly by talking about his wife. I’ll call him Mikey because that’s like the kind of infantilizing name by which the family called him. Talking about his wife is exactly what he did. He talked only about his wife. It was the damnedest thing. I could not get him to talk about himself except through focusing on what his wife wanted of him and the travails she exposed him to. He explained to me, actually he complained to me, that she would buy things, get tired of them, and ask him to resell them for her, usually at some fraction of the original cost. Nevertheless, although he could sell them only for, let’s say, half of what they originally cost, the income from these resales was substantial enough that it was crucial to supporting their current lifestyle, which was otherwise constrained by what the family trust money would allow them. Mikey was exasperated by her getting and spending, her selling and spending again. He talked about it all the time. He would have to arrange to return or resell the things, call the stores to manage their credit points (on which they also relied for buying yet more things), and attempt to rein her in because his mother-in-law was constantly on him to manage his wife’s overspending. And he had to manage the family business for the whole coterie of the three daughters and a slightly no-account son, a business inherited from his deceased father-in-law and on which they were all dependent.

Mikey’s wife was in therapy, too, but she complained that the therapy put uncomfortable pressure on her to examine her life. Because we had permission to speak, her therapist was able to confirm to me that Mikey’s description of his wife’s life and her constant complaints about any constraints he put on her was pretty much the way Mikey described it. Although my understanding was that her therapist worked hard about putting even gentle pressure on her toward self-examination, just the pressure of being in therapy and the invitation to look into her own behavior and way of living at all was more than she could stand. Soon she chafed at the prospect of continuing therapy and then began to feel that my work with Mikey threatened to unravel his compliance with her wishes. She began to lobby him to stop therapy. Mikey said to me, “I like coming here. I feel you are the only person I can talk to about the life I lead. But I’m going to have to stop because, if I don’t, everything in my life will fall apart.” So, he complied with his wife’s pressure and stopped.

In the middle of treating Mikey, it had occurred to me that, inside his mind, he had no independent life. His only way of feeling alive was to be inside his wife. His inner object of her served as substitute for an inner sense of self. Metaphorically, and unconsciously, he lived inside his wife. I formulated this to myself: that “he lived in his object.” It was as though he had no life outside his thoughts about her.

My formulation of Mikey’s problem also stemmed from my countertransference. Gradually, I came to realize that when I was with him, I would be longing for him to “get a life” outside his complaints about his wife. That was my crude formulation of a longing for him to develop a self, to develop a masculine capacity to confront her and actually to confront himself. My countertransference was my early guide to the specifics of what seemed to be missing in his inner world.

Once I had formulated the idea for myself that Mikey lived in his object, I realized that to a certain extent everybody does this. The people who are important to us define who we are. Our struggles with them are the struggles of ourselves in action, in relationship to the most important people in our lives. To a large extent, we all live through our objects.

How different is this dyadic formulation from an Oedipal version of the same problem? A three-year-old girl who had quite a lovely relationship with her mother said to her, “You’re a bad mommy.” “Who isn’t bad?” asked her mother. “Daddy is a good daddy!” the girl said. From having a previously good overall relationship with her mother, she was facing her developmental challenge by formulating the Oedipal version of inhabiting a bad object, splitting it off from the idealized object. We all know this psychic formula, but my point here is that this leads to a familiar pattern of patients (and other people) who live in this formulation, who cannot forgive their mothers or fathers, and who live in and through grievances with or idealizations of them.

This is a very different from the way Winnicott formulated the situation. For him, object relating came first. He dated the capacity for creative destruction of the object, with the aim of being able to create a new object, as the beginning of mutuality. It is in this paper that he states that the object was there before the infant created it, but the mother must not challenge the infant’s sense that the infant created the new object. It is the creative act, founded in creative destructiveness, that opens a place for discovery of the real world of relationships. Mikey would have had to be able to destroy the image of his self-centered wife as all-powerful and displacing all room for him to have an independently operating mind. He could not bear to carry out that act of destruction. It was not her refusal to allow him independence that was the problem – although she certainly did forbid it. It was his own act of forbidding himself to challenge her and risk losing her in the attempt to spur her growth and his own. That he could not face.

In the ordinary process of development, we hope that our children will destroy the image of us as all-powerful and as constituting their sole universe, so that they can develop new relationships with each of us as they grow up and so they can develop the capacity to relate to others with mutual give-and-take. We hope they will not simply live inside these other people as their inner objects.

So, what is the process of doing this in a way that is beyond the enigma of Winnicott’s description? And, in a parallel way, what is the pathology of failure to accomplish this developmental task?

Thinking through this line becomes easier once we include the conception of the link as formulated by Pichon-Rivière (Scharff, Losso and Setton, 2017; Losso, de Setton and Scharff, 2017). Conceptually the link is formed as an external structure in the space between two people or between members of a group. Its organization is developed by these people interacting, and, in turn, it organizes the individuals themselves who make up the link. A link is an interactional structure formed by a combination of individuals’ unconscious and conscious interactions, the movements of their bodies and their speech. It represents an organization in the space between the people and between their minds; that is, the totality of their interacting relationship. Then, in turn, this link pattern contributes to their continuing re-organization.

Then the link itself is represented in the mind of each of the individuals. Pichon-Rivière followed Fairbairn’s description of the psyche as formed by a series of self-and-object links (1952). These internal linked organizations are themselves in constant dynamic interaction inside the mind. The organization of mind is a fractal of the external link between emotional partners. The minds of each partner are constantly reformed by their dynamic link, and they constantly contribute to ongoing links with the social world.

Therefore, when we talk about somebody living in the object, we are describing a person who lives psychically at one pole of a bipolar internal organization. In ordinary life, people live with an oscillation between aspects of their organized self and aspects of their internal object organizations. Internal objects are, as Fairbairn described, parts of the mind. Both self and object are parts of the ego capable of generating activity. Our internal objects can be the organizers through which we speak, just as our self-organizations are.

For instance, an adolescent patient berates her therapist. On examination it turns out that she is treating the therapist the way she feels her mother treats her. At this moment in therapy, it is irrelevant whether the mother actually treats her so badly or whether this is a construction she makes of a mother who is simply setting limits. While we understand that such a teenager is more likely to feel that she has an actually cruel mother and that the degree of cruelty will feel worse if mother is actually behaving cruelly to her, at the moment in the therapy that is not the point. The point at that moment is that our teenage patient is speaking from her internal object rather than from the aspect of herself, who, in this exchange, feels mistreated. Instead, it is the therapist in her countertransference who feels mistreated just now. At other times such an adolescent speaks for herself, complaining about how she suffers at the hands of her mother or, even on a good day, saying, “My mother’s not really so bad, but sometimes she just gives me a pain.” That is to say, a patient who is relatively healthy is capable of speaking from her self-organization and less often speaks from the sense that she is living inside the bad internal object. Of course, an internal object can also be good-enough. In this position, the girl would be saying kind things about a world that otherwise she might be inclined to speak ill of. Or the internal object can be idealized, as when somebody speaks from the position of living in the idealized or exciting internal object, as happens in the passion of young romance.

So, it seems to me that Mikey was embodying a particular kind of pathology of the use of an object. He was living in his indispensable bad object. His is the pathology of someone who is trapped in the world of his internal object, with no perspective other than that of the internal object or, at least, no perspective other than the focus on and sense of living inside a constraining relationship with that internal object. There is no feeling of mutuality in this sense of being trapped. Unconsciously, such patients are organized by the sense that “I need to do something either to be obedient to the internal object or to be constantly in a battle with it because it defines who I am, who I am allowed to be.” This sense is unconscious, although there are always important conscious derivatives of it. That is, one can be entirely conscious of a feeling that the world is dominated by this figure. From our perspective, it is an internal object, but to the person the other is a constant presence in his or her mind that determines almost everything that the person does or feels – mood, organization, and orientation toward the world. But the reasons for living this way psychically are centered in the person’s sense of being trapped and are principally unconscious fantasies. More important, these are unconscious axioms about how the person must live. Therefore, such patients are often rather unavailable to therapists, as these axioms are held to be unquestioned truths about the only way they can relate to the important people in their lives. If there are people in these patients’ lives who would like to have a more mutual relationship, that mutuality has to be denied.

Here is an example that will be familiar to child and family therapists.

Quentin came to me because his wife, Samantha, could not let go of the idea that her 14-year-old son, Adam, was up to no good in one way or another. She worried incessantly about Adam and could not let go of her preoccupation with him. According to Quentin’s description, she was living in her son-as-object. This man thought that his son was doing fine. “He’s a little laconic, it’s true. He doesn’t seem to have any great ambitions, but he has cottoned on to the art program at school with great enthusiasm. And he generally gets As, with the exception of history, which he doesn’t like but in which he still gets a B. It’s true he spends a lot of time in his room, that he wanders around the neighborhood with a changing combination of friends, and that we don’t really know who the friends are.” This preoccupation of Samantha’s meant that there was a great deal of strain in the couple’s relationship, too, since Quentin got along better with Adam than with his wife, sharing activities like tennis, which occasionally he and his son played together. Adam actually did seem to work on his tennis fairly actively. He refused to take lessons but had taught himself fairly well.

We could say that this man was partly living in the middle of his wife’s distress, living in her as an object. Certainly, he presented the situation as constraining his relationship with her, and that is the problem he brought to me. He presented this as more of a problem than the fact that he drank more than she wished and that drinking had been a constant factor in the evenings at home. He traveled a great deal for work, something he no longer enjoyed, and he felt pretty washed out when he got home from a job that had become a burden. However, what distinguishes Quentin from the example of Mikey is that Quentin had another life in the sense that he talked about other relationships – his life at work, his own aspirations and interests. So, he was living in his internal constrained object only to the extent that this was a problem in his life.

Later on, Samantha became obsessed with the idea that Adam was on drugs. As a result, she searched his room and his backpack and found a small vial of a powdery substance. They sent it for testing, and it turned out it was a synthetic of marijuana. This confirmed her darkest suspicions, while for the husband this was the kind of ordinary problem that parents face these days, something to be taken seriously but not a calamity. What Quentin regretted most was the fear that this confirmation of his wife’s preoccupation not just would become the defining element of her relationship with her son, which was impaired by her suspicions of him, but also would also come to totally define Quentin’s relationship with his wife.

This woman was living in the worrisome object of her son, a part of herself that she was terribly worried about as going bad, being out of control and going down a path of destruction. And her living in the worrisome object-son then affected her marital relationship so that her husband was living in her – or, perhaps more accurately, in the worrisome mother-son pair as a combined inner object – in a parallel preoccupation. (I did have confirmation of this formulation about her from Samantha’s therapist since we were authorized to talk.)

I suggested that we have a family session. Adam had refused to have treatment earlier when he had been so apparently lacking in motivation, but now, with this discovery, Quentin was able to make the case that Adam no longer had a choice. In the session Quentin and Samantha were able to confront Adam about what he had done. He understood that he had been caught red-handed. Taking advantage of this crisis in their family, we were able to discuss Adam’s feeling that his mother did not trust him and that this distrust colored their entire relationship.

When I asked Samantha about the possible origins of her fear about Adam, she connected it to her schizophrenic brother. In his late teen years, he had suddenly become psychotic. He had never recovered, never been able to have a productive life. She had spent her life after her parents’ death taking care of him. She connected her preoccupation with Adam with her constant fear. She was afraid that there might be some sign that she would miss that Adam would come to the same fate, and so any hint of a misstep on his part brought out her tremendous fears for his development. In the session, she was able to say that she felt he communicated so little to her about his life that the gap between them fueled her fear and suspiciousness, while admitting that her position of being suspicious of him all the time amounted to what Samantha called a “paranoid position.” She owned up to the idea that she carried this preoccupation in excess of anything that he had done to provoke it, and that this had informed a malignant element in their relationship. She said to Adam, “But If you would only talk to me more, just to tell me ordinary things about your life, it would help me in my own attempts to control this so it would not contaminate our relationship.”

Adam said that he wanted more freedom than he had in the past, because he was getting older and he thought he behaved generally in a responsible way. He maintained the story that this synthetic marijuana was put in his backpack by a friend and that he had nothing to do with it, but he agreed that its discovery justified his parents’ suspiciousness. Nevertheless, he said, he would like more sense of trust from them, more independence, although he still wanted to be connected to them. In his turn, Quentin was able to say to his wife that her unrelenting suspiciousness about their son had a negative impact on their relationship, too. He wanted a return of the sense of freedom from constraint that had characterized their early relationship. He experienced her having a child as something that provoked her worries in a way that impinged on the sense of a more loving mutuality throughout the family. Samantha was able to say to her husband that his unavailability through travel and through his excessive drinking in the evenings left her alone and more focused on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: how do we use others?
• 1 Living in the object
• 2 What does the object (in our patients’ lives) have to do with it?
• 3 Dreaming up, re-finding, and grieving lost objects: a case study
• 4 Creating a new relationship in child analysis: revisiting theoretical ideas of developmental and transference objects
• 5 Analysis interminable: the analyst’s self as object for the patient
• 6 Can an ingroup be an internal object?: a case for a new construct
• 7 Beyond subject and object, or why object-usage is not a good idea
• 8 The use of the object: personal and clinical reflections
• Epilogue
• Index