What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

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20 Neil J. Skolnick ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ be a child’s offer of a smile, a scrap of paper, or an actual gift, its acceptance by a parent, in neither exaggerated nor devalued manner, is a crucial signal to the child of a secure, valued connection, a connection partially created by the child’s loving and creative gesture. A deficit of experience with a parent’s heartfelt embrace of the child’s offerings of love can weaken the child’s sense of efficacy, selfworth regulation, and ability to believe in the loving intent of others. It can also lead to a devaluation of ambitions and dreams, creations and productions whose loving offerings are also felt to be of no consequence. Most tragically, it can result in overwhelming feelings of worthlessness. The importance of analysts’ not retreating from their patients’ loving offerings has not been accentuated nearly enough in our technical recommendations. I wholeheartedly add this wrinkle to the list of therapeutic activities required of the good object. We certainly encourage our patients to express their anger and rage at us, yet we can have enormous difficulty accepting their loving expressions. These we tend to interpret, entirely missing the point. A patient’s loving gestures can take on an infinite variety of expression. It is important that we try to distinguish them from nonadaptive enactments or other collusive enticements. For example, sometimes a patient may offer an expression of sincere gratitude. Before dismissing it with interpretations of idealization, manipulation, or sexual bidding, which it certainly might be on occasion, I have found a simple “thank you” to be of enormous value. An interpretation at such a time can be experienced as a devaluation, an attack, or a rejection. Some other, but by no means exclusive, examples I have come across include receiving appropriate gifts, realistic compliments, constructive criticism, or real concern about real illness. Here I think of another patient of mine. He is a 30-somethingyear-old man, the son of a successful celebrity father. His father would engage in frequent contact with adoring audiences whom he likewise blessed with visible adoration. But, in the presence of his son, my patient, he remained distant, aloof, and reticent. My patient reported frequent attempts to connect with his father that were shunned, ignored, or criticized. He especially recalled repeated attempts to enter his father’s basement workshop, a place where his father isolated himself most of the time when at home. My patient craved a connection of any kind with his father, whether to shoot the breeze,
What’s a Good Object to Do 21 ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ get advice, or talk about his own endeavors. He had both athletic and artistic abilities that went mostly unnoticed by his father. When he entered the study, his father would typically regard him with a blank stare and remain eerily silent until my patient would quietly exit, nursing the sinking feeling of being an unwelcome and deplorable intruder in his father’s life. I remarked that, while his father had rarely expressed generous feelings of love and pride toward him, equally, if not more, unbearable was that his father could not accept his offerings of love and friendship. My patient concurred, breaking into deep sobs. He desperately wanted his father to receive his adoration, to accept his kudos and offerings of friendship. Being the youngest by many years in a house with much older siblings and a self-centered, narcissistic mother, he looked toward his father lovingly, as an ally. Unable to tolerate his father’s not accepting his offers of “sonship,” he retreated to an invisible, withdrawn, and dejected place he continues to occupy as an adult. I worked for a time with another man, who, after a brief idealization of me, comfortably settled into an extensive period of pure, unbridled contempt and devaluation of me. He particularly would bombard me with bitter disapproval, especially when I responded to his verbal hostility with suggestions of possible meanings (gingerly offered interpretations). In fact, all attempts to ascribe meaning to our interaction were cynically dismissed. I understood this rejection to reflect the unrelenting positioning of his psychic organization in the paranoid/schizoid mode. After a time, he entered a session with a story about walking down a street with a friend. They passed a hardware store, at which point he turned to his friend and pronounced that his apartment was very dry and he needed to buy a “humiliator.” His friend replied, he told me, “You don’t need a humiliator; you need a “dehumiliator.” Laughing and with a sparkle in his eye, he looked at me and declared, “That was a gift.” I laughed heartily, signaling my acceptance of the gift. I knew (or at least hoped) that at that moment we had turned a corner and his self and object integration had progressed. I could have offered a number of interpretations having to do with, say, his wit being an expression of hostility, or his making an offer of reparation for the numerous times he had degraded me. But I would have missed the essence of his message—the offer of his love.
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