The Primer of Object Relations Therapy

For the majority of MA or MS students, object relations is tough sledding compared to, say, Watson's and Skinner's behaviorism or Beck's and Ellis's cognitive-behaviorism. For some, it's even more challenging than Cozzolino's and Gazzaniga's millennia-era neuropsychology. I would have struggled a lot more with Fairbairn and all his legions (including Bion, Kernberg, Klein, Mahler, Meissner, Winnicott, et al) if it hadn't been for this (sort of) fin de sicle summarization from the Scharff's. OR -- or "neo-Freudianism" for some -- is, however, really useful stuff for the organized eclecticist who hits the wall with a treatment-resistent borderline, compulsive, narcissist or paranoid... and needs to figure out what's going on Way Down There in their core beliefs, current appraisals, overwhelming affects and bullet-proof behavior. For me, anyway, OR is a "language" as much as a philosophy, and its many terms require definition every bit as much as all those acronyms Marsha Linehan came up with. I'm now able to see "projections," "projective (self-) identifications," "paranoid transferences," "exiciting, ideal, and rejecting objects" and a lot more as =very= useful guides to the dynamics of the personality disorders. And that helps us find our way (in collaborative fashion) through the maze of conflicting appraisals and evaluations demonstrated by the transferences... right down to the core beliefs, values, idea(l)s, assumptions, convictions and/or attitudes that need to be identified, examined, questioned... and then reframed, revised and/or just rejected. The modern-day CBT or REBT practitioner with an open mind may gain a lot of useful insight here, even if he or she does not wish to work in the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic framework.