Old and new objects in Fairbairnian and American relational theory

Reply to Reviews by Slavin, Stein, and Stern

“…Because of the effort to provide such opportunities-probably common to most relational perspectives-it may well be the case that certain kinds of "reliving" of early childhood experiences of deprivation and nonrecognition will be sacrificed. In a recent article in this journal, mentioned earlier, the first of a three-part series on the "intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis," Gerhardt et al (2000) comment that, "according to Cooper and Levit (1998), one difference between British object relations and the American relational school is that the latter is quicker to invoke a new object experience-both in terms of its theoretical importance and its role in clinical practice-rather than hold the role of bad object, as Fairbairn's theory suggests" (p. 25). I believe that may be true.…”

Recognition of Difference in the Author–Discussant Relation: Reply to Commentary

“…As such, both participants can begin to confront their previously entrenched unconscious fantasies of self and other and hopefully come to occupy different structural slots or new ways of relating to the other. Or, in Cooper and Levit's (1998) terms, both analyst and patient temporarily become "new objects" for each other, spawning ever new fantasies and new enactments. In such cases, it may be that the patient's confrontation with and recognition of the analyst's independent existence as outside and different from the patient's fantasy (subjecthood) may be most usefully brought about by the analyst's introducing or communicating aspects of her personhood.…”

The Intersubjective Turn in Psychoanalysis: A Comparison of Contemporary Theorists: Part 2: Christopher Bollas

“…In terms of the first question, it is precisely Bollas's elaboration of the phenomenology of the receptive capacity as the prerequisite for the emergence of unconscious derivatives that distinguishes his views from those of most other intersubjective theorists. 1 As we shall see, for Bollas, the intersubjective trope has less to do with self-conscious habits of thought such as mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988), acknowledging the patient's effect on the analyst (Ehrenberg, 1992), the evocation of new object experiences (Cooper and Levit, 1998), mutual reciprocal influence (Aron, 1996), or countertransference disclosure of the therapist's affect (Maroda, 1994), but instead revolves around creating and maintaining conditions for the use of unconscious processes-both his own and his patient's-in the service of locating the patient's disavowed psychic material. Indeed, as Bollas (1992) argues, because "the patient struggles with the rhetorical burden of narration," which involves him in secondary-process thought, whereas the analyst is the one who "is often lost in thought" (p. 109), it may be that, en route to the patient's unconscious, "the most 'alive' material deriving through association occurs within the psychoanalyst" (p. 113, italics added).…”