What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

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18 Neil J. Skolnick ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ which I relegated to transference Should I let her know how great sexual arousal can feel Crawling into my own unconscious, I found the place where my own sexual feelings had run into my parents’ arousals, competitions, anxieties, and prohibitions, which furthermore had left me in embarrassing, anxiety-ridden, and challenging places. Working these feelings through (again), I acknowledged the source of my sexual feelings and how they interplayed with Marianna’s internal sexual scenarios. What I had experienced prior to working my issues through, and in the mutual projection and introjection of self and other seductive scenarios, was something akin to what she and her overly seductive father had repeatedly experienced. Her sexual organization was contaminated by her family’s dynamics (as was mine, although not necessarily the same dynamics) and her father’s inappropriate seductive advances. Disidentifying with the projections of her father, I realized that, of course, I would never act on my sexual arousals with her. My purpose (and what should have been her father’s purpose) was to allow her to feel safe with her sexuality while I admired her attractiveness without lascivious intent (like a proud, enchanted, but appropriately distanced father). Without revealing, consciously at any rate, my own feelings and the process I was going through, over the next series of sessions I acknowledged her sexual feelings and their normality. I accepted them, celebrated them even, and assured her that we would never act on them. This acknowledgment, I believe, allowed her to experience sexual feelings in a new context, a safe, appropriate context with a new good object. Her embarrassment and shame, like my initial anxiety, gradually dissipated, and her tolerance for her own sexual impulses, now existing in interaction with my accepting but safe responses to them, increased. She began dating and having pleasurable sex and ultimately married, at which time she successfully terminated treatment. Some might scoff at my technique. They would belittle it as a “transference cure,” a cure in which I gratified her archaic impulses. I would reply that all “cures” are transference cures. But we do not gratify impulsive wishes; instead they are experienced and detoxified in the context of a new relationship, a new relationship with a good object. And in this new relationship Marianna had the opportunity to identify with the dynamic processes that I tortured through and worked on to recover from my own temporary insanity.
What’s a Good Object to Do 19 ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Relational Needs Require Acceptance of Our Patients’ Love Recently psychoanalysts have turned their attention to deciphering the nature of love in a deconstructed world and, by extension, in the analytic relationship. Steven Mitchell (2001), in his last works, was attempting to shine new light on love and passion’s trajectory through the life span; and others (Davies, 1994; Hoffman, 1998; Applebaum, 1999) have been exploring love’s sexual and nonsexual presence in the analytic relationship. Freud (1920) and Klein (1975a) considered love to be a derivative of our most basic instinctual inheritance and ultimately a sublimated expression of the sexual drive, at times in fusion with aggressive drive elements. Love was thought to be the ultimate mature expression of our bestial inheritance. Fairbairn (1952), reversing this primal scenario, proclaimed sex to be a well-suited, although by no means exclusive, expression of mature mutual love. Speaking on a different, less drive-infused level of discourse, he situated a person’s involvement with love at birth. He located love’s essence at the heart of our fundamental human nature, our need for establishing and maintaining loving connections. Mental health, for Fairbairn, was virtually assured with parental love; pathology arose from its disruption or absence. But he went further than that, although little of what he espoused has carried over to today’s sensibilities. As noted, he placed a need for love at the very center of the child’s psychic inheritance at birth. Love is not only a requisite of the child, needed for safe passage across developmental horizons. A child likewise enters the world with a need to express loving desires, desires that guide the child toward, and assure the child of, needed connections with others. In this Fairbairn was greatly influenced by Suttie (Harrow, 1998), a Scottish theoretician who wrote about the deleterious psychological effects of society’s taboo on intimacy. With the centrality of a primary need for love in mind, Fairbairn emphasized that for the healthy development of a child, not only should parents be able to love their child without excessive narcissistic investment, but also, and equally crucial, they need to accept the child’s offers of love. For infants and adults like, the acceptance of loving gestures affirms and reaffirms our secure connections and membership in a world of other like beings. Whether the loving gesture
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What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

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