What we’ve said about Object relations

“We all carry internal pictures of ourselves and others, and a lot of this is unconscious. Early experience builds up these templates of who we think we are and how we typically view other people. In adult life, we actually tend to recreate these templates”

“Anna Freud advances defense theory within that frame. Then comes object relations with Klein and Kernberg being the big people. And that focuses a lot on internal representations of self and others and how that shapes our unconscious life”

“Now, early on, our minds are sorted into good representations and bad representations, and they're not merged together. So mother is either all good or all bad. And with development, those two different neural pathways can merge together so that we can view one person as both caring and disappointing”

“through a series of minor chronic frustrations that improve your ability to understand that the all good mom and the all bad mom are the exact same thing. So splitting develops when that process is interrupted”

“because the self is weak, we must do it. We must take on other characteristics in order to survive, to feel whole, to feel alive or good enough, or else we fall into that deep pit of despair”

“when we're under a lot of stress, we can get paranoid. We can begin to attribute all bad things and all aggression to the outside, and we're all good. Or we can sometimes even do the opposite. We can start to say, I'm awful and I deserve to be destroyed”

“That we can reach what's called the depressive position where we can sort of have a balanced view of ourselves and others as both good and bad at the same time. And that we can also feel true remorse, that we can feel and understand that we've taken from others, hurt others, and that we should repair that”

“Rather than going to the depressive position, you can manage intense emotions and distress by saying basically extreme denial in the manic defense and saying basically, oh, I don't need anything. I can't lose anything. Everything is fine and nothing can hurt me”

“Psychiatrists and psychiatry specialists are increasingly going to have to deal with complex cases over time. And that means that we really, really, really want to know about the lessons of object relations”