Intro to Object Relations Theory and Experiential Applications
Introduction to the Object Relations Clinical Theory and Its Clinical Experiential Applications
1st Trimester of Year 1 of the One-Year, Two-Year and the Full Training in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
(can be also taken as an individual post-graduate certificate course; no pre-requisites)
Dates: October 2, 2014 – December 11, 2014, Thursdays, 8:15-9:30pm.
Tuition: $450/ 10-week course (can be paid in 2 installments, as per request)
Location: 115 East 9th Street (@ 3rd Avenue); 12P, NYC, 10003 or Virtual participation – via audio/video or audio only.
This course will introduce students to critical psychic structure issues related to character disorder pathology and the related developmental issues. Clinical technique will be addressed through both original readings in British and American object relations theory, as well as in “in vivo” role playing demonstrations. Through the role playing, the students will have an opportunity to experience their patients from the inside out. Various character resistances will be discussed in relation to Donald W. Winnicott’s contributions to this topic, as well as to some representatives of American school of object relations, such Althea Horner and Thomas Ogden.
Post-graduate psychoanalytic education credits offered: 12.5hrs.
This class will consist of readings, discussions, and role plays.
Syllabus and readings:
First Week:
Sigmund Freud’s (1917) Mourning and Melancholia was the beginning of object relations thinking. Discussion of this seminal work by Freud will be supplemented by the “morning and melancholia” role play, with student(s) playing the role of their patients.
Second Week:
Read: of Chapters 1 and 2 of Althea Horner’s (2000) book, Resistances in Psychotherapy.This book helps one to focus on finding the core relational issue in working with any patients. Lecture and Discussion.
Third Week:
Read: Chapters 3 and 4 of the same book by Althea Horner.
Discussion of these chapters and the role-play will demonstrate the core relational issues, and how separation-individuation theories and Margaret Mahler’s toddler/mother research play a part in these theories. Discussion will relate to core self-integration through the internalization of the “good enough” mother, and through the child’s “imaging” of the mother in her absence, during the phrases of separation in Mahler’s theories.
Fourth Week:
Read: Two papers by D. W. Winnicott: 1) “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958) in the Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965), and 2) “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—a Study of the First Not Me Possession” (1953) – in Playing and Reality(1971).
Fifth Week:
Read: R. W. Fairbairn’s original papers: “The Repression and Return of Bad Objects,” and the “Moral Defense” chapter in Fairbairn’s collected papers, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952). There will be a role-play in this class, related to someone playing the role of a patient who is addicted to a “bad object.”
Sixth Week:
Read: Classic paper by M. Klein (1957), “Envy and Gratitude,” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works. Class discussion and the role play will include the topic of instinctual aggression and the role of development in modifying aggression and envy, as spoken about by Winnicott and Kavaler-Adler.
Seventh Week:
Read: 1) Chapter on “The Paranoid Schizoid Position” of Melanie Klein – from T. Ogden’s (1986) book, Matrix of the Mind. 2)M. Klein’s original paper on “Schizoid Mechanisms.”
Eighth Week:
Read: 1) “The Depressive Position” chapter in Thomas Ogden’s Matrix of the Mind. 2) M. Klein’s (1940) “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States” (in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945).
Ninth Week:
Read: 1) S. Kavaler-Adler’s “Pivotal Moments of Surrender to Mourning the Parental Internal Objects,” in Psychoanalytic Review,94, 763-789. 2). S. Kavaler-Adler’s “Mourning and Erotic Transference,” in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,1992, 73(3), 527-539.
Tenth Week:
Read: 1) S. Kavaler-Adler’s “From Benign Mirror to the Demon Lover: An Object Relations View of Compulsion Versus Desire,” in the American Journal of psychoanalysis, 65, 31-52. 2) “The Case of David: Nine Years on the Couch for Sixty Minutes, Once Week” in American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 65,103-134. This class will include the course summary discussion and the role play.
For more information, please contact ORI administrator by email at or by phone at 646-522-1056.
2013 Conference – on Countertransference, Regret, Aggression, and Their Vicissitudes
2012 Conference on Self-Sabotage: Jungian, Kleinian, and Fairbairnian Perspectives.
