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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 .
Splitting was first described by Ronald Fairbairn in his formulation of object relations theory in 1952; it begins as the inability of the infant to combine the fulfilling aspects of the parents (the good object) and their unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object) into the same individuals, instead seeing the good and bad as separate. In ...
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]
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 ...
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.
Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.Projective identification may be used as a type of defense, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a route to psychological change; [1] used for ridding the self of unwanted parts or for controlling the other's body and mind.
In the psychotherapeutic relationship, self and object representations are activated in the transference. In the course of the therapy, projection and identification are operating, i.e., devalued self-representations are projected onto the therapist whilst the client identifies with a critical object representation.