What I’m Learning: Object relations

It’s funny. I spent ages on my course, trying to think of a way to combine what I’m learning with my new discipline of providing therapy to children and young adults.

Then it occurred to me.

I could write about what I’m learning.

It seemed so obvious, I can’t believe it took me two years to come up with it. On the plus side, it does mean I will be able to trawl through my old notes on weeks that I don’t have lessons to do the most important thing you can do on today’s internet – generate content regularly.

But today I’m going to start with what I will be taught over the coming weekend: object relations. I’m actually going to cover several topics this weekend, but I want to break it down a little bit, for my understanding and hopefully for yours, too.

Object relations

Object relations is nothing to do with objectophilia (which I will not be linking to). iIt is a needlessly confusing name for a concept that I think is pretty straightforward.

It started as an offshoot of Freud’s psychoanalysis but was expanded by Heinz Kohut, Margaret Mahler and many, many others.

Essentially, inside us all we have our understanding of the world. This starts from before we are born because we start perceiving the world before we have been born*. We start forming ideas in our minds of who we are, what the people around us are like, and how that all plays out in the world around us. We attach qualities or adjectives to these ideas based on what we experience. So if we have loving, attentive parents, we attach words like “lovable” and “capable” to our idea of ourselves; words like “kind” and “nurturing” to our idea of both our parents as individuals and to the idea of parents in a more Platonic sense; and qualities like “supportive” and “equal” to relationships that we seek out. If we have abusive parents, we go the opposite way, attaching negative qualities to our ideas of ourselves, others and our relationships.

These ideas are what Kohut, et al, are referring to when they talk about ‘objects’. It’s sort of our mental picture of the people around us, as opposed to the real individual. It’s our mental picture of ourselves, as opposed to what we are objectively like. And it’s our expectations of our place in the world and how we relate to others, as opposed to the reality of how relationships can be.

In the literature, objects are referred to as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but I prefer to say that these ideas can be helpful or unhelpful. And each helpful idea can have an unhelpful side, and vice versa. Like a supportive parent can easily become an enabling one. Or how a harshly critical teacher might push certain students to achieve more than they thought they could. I am absolutely not endorsing this as a method of teaching, by the way, just pointing out that some things can come out of a bad situation, like mushrooms out of cow shit. More stuff grows in supportive, conducive environments, but some stuff can grow in shit.

So basically, we take these ideas, and we go out into the world and make situations that will corroborate or reinforce these ideas, because that’s where we’re most comfortable. We’ll stay in jobs where the boss yells at us if we have a view of ourselves as incompetent and we had parents who yelled at us for all of our mistakes, for example. Or we’ll seek out partners who are supportive and caring if we view ourselves as inherently deserving of love and if we view relationships as places of kindness and nurturing.

You can see, then, how these ideas that we form from the earliest of stages will kind of push us in certain directions. This, incidentally, is where Eric Berne’s ideas about life scripts dovetail in beautifully. And as I am on a course that is centred on the modality of transactional analysis, I feel I have to throw at least one of his concepts in.

So anyway, these ideas push us in certain directions. That is, unless we stop to unpick these ideas to figure out which ideas we find helpful, which we find unhelpful, and how to get rid of the unhelpful ones. And one great place to do that is in the therapy room!

In the therapy room

In the therapy room, a client can:

1. Look at their current patterns of thought and behaviour
2. See how those patterns relate to the ideas they formed in their earliest years
3. Encounter just enough resistance and challenge from the therapist to spur further thought (repeating throughout the process)
4. Decide what is helpful and what is unhelpful
5. Form ways to mitigate or even get rid of the unhelpful ideas
6. Strengthen the helpful ideas and even form new helpful ideas to replace unhelpful ones
7. Bring all this together so they can approach new life situations with new ideas

The therapist will provide the stability, consistency, permissions and modelling the client needs to confront the ideas they formed in the past. For me, this would ideally involve a bit of gratitude for the unhelpful ideas, even as the client works to reject or reform them. Ideas that are now unhelpful were once formed because – at the time and for that person – they seemed to fit with the world as they saw it. It gave them defences against a world that isn’t always as kind as it should be. Of course, children can’t or won’t articulate their ideas quite like that, so personally, I will just endeavour to hold that in mind. A child who needs my help to form new ideas about how adults treat them, for example, isn’t broken. They just formed ideas that helped them get this far, and I will treat those ideas with respect, even as I try to become an example of an adult who treats them with kindness and respect and help them form new ideas.

Object relations and me

Lately I have found myself struggling with the idea of the therapeutic relationship, where I am as important as the client in the therapy room, because of my own ideas. I had ideas about myself, others and relationships that essentially said:

• I have too many thoughts and ideas, and my personality is too much.
• At best, other people are not interested in what I have to say. At worst, it will make them angry.
• It is best, therefore, to keep most of my thoughts and most of my personality to myself. Other people’s needs should take precedence over mine, and the vast majority of a conversation should centre on the other person, if I want to have a good relationship with them.

I thought becoming a therapist would fit into this view of the world beautifully. After all, where is it better to stay silent and let people focus on themselves more than in the therapy room? But it turns out that doing that is massively unhelpful. Or, at least, it’s ineffective, according to object relations theory. In this theory, the therapist need to trigger transference for the client, where the client sees the therapist as an alternative to or reproduction of people in their primary relationships. Once the client sees me as a metaphor for these other people in their lives and sees how I respond differently to them, that client can begin to form new ideas. If I sit passively, doing nothing, I don’t trigger transference, and the process doesn’t even start.

Luckily I’ve been working on these ideas in my own therapy, so I am more able to integrate this theory myself and model more helpful ideas about self to my clients.

I hope this write-up has helped you. It has certainly helped me organise some of my ideas about ideas and objects and how they relate to object relations. Down below, I’ve included a couple of videos that I found helpful, if you’d like to learn more. And if I’ve got something wrong or if you have a different understanding, feel free to kindly share your ideas with me.

And until next time, keep well. Or don’t. I’m a trainee therapist, not a cop.

*This never means it’s all the mother’s fault, and I hate that implication. But it is true that in the womb we can hear voices and our mother’s heartbeat, and we receive her hormones, including hormones relating to stress or relaxation, through the placenta to help us prepare ourselves for the world we are entering. That whole world is not the individual mother’s fault.