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Object relations theory is a school of thought in psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis centered around theories of stages of ego development. Its concerns include the relation of the psyche to others in childhood and the exploration of relationships between external people, as well as internal images and the relations found in them. [1]
In object relations theory, the paranoid-schizoid position is a state of mind of children, from birth to four or six months of age.. Melanie Klein [2] has described the earliest stages of infantile psychic life in terms of a successful completion of development through certain positions.
Relational psychoanalysis began in the 1980s as an attempt to integrate interpersonal psychoanalysis's emphasis on the detailed exploration of interpersonal interactions with British object relations theory's ideas about the psychological importance of internalized relationships with other people. [2]
By the 1970s, several challenges to the philosophical, theoretical, and clinical tenets of ego psychology emerged. The most prominent of which were: a "rebellion" led by Rapaport's protégés (George Klein, Robert Holt, Roy Schafer, and Merton Gill); object relations theory; and self psychology.
In her object relations theory, Klein argues that "the earliest experiences of the infant are split between wholly good ones with 'good' objects and wholly bad experiences with 'bad' objects", [53] as children struggle to integrate the two primary drives, love and hate, into constructive social interaction. An important step in childhood ...
The most influential figure for the idea of the internal working model of attachment is Bowlby, who laid the groundwork for the concept in the 1960s. He was inspired by both psychoanalysis, especially object relations theory, and more recent research into ethology, evolution and information-processing.
The fundamental position of Object Relations Theory is that for every developing self there has to be a object to whom it relates, thus every pair of structures contains a version of self paired with a version of the object (other person) to whom the self structure was relating.
Explanations of the idealization of others besides the self are sought in drive theory as well as in object relations theory. From the viewpoint of libidinal drives, idealization of other people is a "flowing-over" of narcissistic libido onto the object; from the viewpoint of self-object relations, the object representations (like that of the ...