What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

What’s a Good Object to Do 5
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are garnered from years of practice and changing theoretical contexts.
It is my belief that actual clinical experience with patients (our
hermeneutic data, if you will), accompanied by careful, intense
circumspection and debate, will lead to more reliable statements about
higher levels of abstraction to accompany an evolving theory of
relational technique. But we are not there yet. When I reflect on my
own evolution as a relational psychoanalyst, I am reminded of the
time I was treating my training control case, over 20 years ago. Toward
the end of a session, it started to rain heavily. Noticing that my patient
had not come with an umbrella and would surely be soaked on this
cold day in March, I tortured briefly over the wisdom of lending him
one of the extra umbrellas that had gathered in my closet. Would this
be a major transgression, a libidinal gratification forever sullying the
development of the transference neurosis and fatally derailing the
treatment Was I involved in a major countertransference acting out
requiring my own continued analysis Or was it simply a thoughtful,
nonsexual but loving gesture required by the serendipitous forces of
Mother Nature, forces that as far as I was concerned might fall outside
the purview of transference Damning Charles Brenner, and every
supervisor I ever had, I gave the patient an umbrella; I figured we
would deal with the interpretive aftermath in future sessions.
In fact, we did deal with the conflict-laden dependency issues evoked
by my act of giving and his reluctance to accept, and the analysis
continued. I was beginning to learn that my interventions, per se, at
choice points in treatment were often not as important as analyzing
the patient’s reactions to my interventions as well as the internal or
coconstructed precipitants of my interventions. The umbrella episode,
for me, marks the beginning of my shifting clinical sensibilities, 2 and
these shifts have been channeled into altered theoretical organizations.
For example, years after the analysis ended, the patient told me he
considered my abandoning an analytic stance by offering him the
umbrella one of the pivotal points in his treatment. He had observed
my discomfort (my self-torture), my humanness, and my decency as
my being just another person, who, like him, did not always have
perfect answers. Today I would say he discovered the good object in
me. That was not an encounter with the idealized or exciting object,
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2
Since that time, similar sentiments have been expressed by the contemporary
Kleinians (Schafer, 1997) working in England.