On the Object Relational Texture of Affects

Abstract

Marty Mayman will be remembered as a uniquely gifted clinician, diagnostician, supervisor, and teacher. In this article, I link his distinctive capacity for empathic understanding to his reliance on self-representational and object representational concepts as a vehicle for accessing the inner life of his participant. Mayman's special brand of empathy was remarkable for its sensitivity to nuance as well as its ability to strike a chord with vivid resonance. His understanding of ego development included the notion that self-representation and object representation make up part of the internalized structure of all ego functions. Self- and object representations can be thought of as embedded in the individual's subjective experience of the very performing of those ego functions. Self- and object representations can also be thought of as embedded in the individual's attitudes toward the exercising of particular ego functions, for example, where the individual struggles with whether or not he or she feels a sense of permission to "own" or exercise specific ego capacities. In this article, I apply the use of self- and object representation as a way of "texturizing" the ego to the way object relations are embedded within affects. I use some Early Memory Test (Mayman, 1968) material to elucidate the role of object relational themes in the specific way in which affects are experienced.