Techniques of Object Relations Couple Therapy

THEORISTS & STRUCTURES

OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Edith Jacobson, Otto Kernberg, and Heinz Kohut began departing from the classical Freudian model when they reexamined and questioned instinctual drive theory through investigations of early formation and differentiation of psychological structures (inner images of the self and the Other, or object) and how these inner structures manifest in interpersonal situations. Their primary focus was on relationships of early life that leave lasting impressions; similar to a residue or remnant within the psyche of the interaction. These residues of past relationships (inner object relations) served to shape perceptions of both individuals and relationships.

Scharff & Scharff summarize it best in their Fairbairnian quote of ego structure: "The structure is seen as one consisting of a system of conscience and unconscious object relationships that crystallize out of the infants experience of real relationships. "Ego structure is the trace of a relationship."

Object relations psychoanalytic theory is the one brand of psychoanalysis that also illuminates family dynamics.

An individual psychology drawn from study of the relationship between patient and therapist, object relations theory holds that the motivating factor in growth and development of the human infant is the need to be in a relationship with a mothering person, not the discharge of energy from some instinct.

Impulses and driven activity are now seen not as primary elemental forces but as desperate attempts to relate or as breakdown products of failed relationships.

Working with Dreams

Creating the Psychological Space

Goals (In Technical Terms)

• To recognize & rework the couple's mutual projective and introjective identifications
• To improve the couple's contextual holding capacity so that the partners can provide for each other's needs for attachment and autonomy, and developmental progression.
• To recover the centered holding relationship that allows for unconscious communication between the spouses, shown in their capacity for empathy, intimacy and sexuality.
• To promote individuation of the spouses and differentiation of needs including the need for individual tx or psychoanalysis.
• To return the couple with confidence to the tasks of the current developmental stage in the couple's life cycle.

Goals Continued...

Goals

• An open-ended formulation of a couple's aims for tx is preferred.
• Therapists are content with a general wish to chnage bx, to become more accomodating, to improve communication and understanding and to function better as a couple.

Working Through and Termination

• Goals are not closely specified because it is restricting.
• Approach is not tailored to the removal of a symptom because the symptom is valued as a beacon that leads us through the layers of defense and anxiety from which it stems.
• Goals tend to change over time as the partners are freed to the experience of the potential of their relationship.

Freud suggested that working through gave the therapeutic effort to keep working away resistance and conflict.

Session is this phase can be plodding, laborious, repetitive, and uninspired.

Termination: after goals have been met, the couple get on with life and love without us.

Holding a Neutral Position

Dreams reveal underlying psychic conflict, repressed affects, shifts from one developmental to another, attempts to master anxiety and to control affective floodings, transferences to therapist or the partner, and refinding lost objects.

1. Discovering the Interpersonal Meaning of the Dream: joint product of marriage, their interaction, individual and shared unconscious fantasy and transference.

2.Reporting of Dreams: what thoughts come to their mind

3.Dream work in Sex Therapy: they move toward an earned security together, to possibilities of better coregulation of affect, and toward the creative construction of new emotional patterns.

1. Offers a model of self-examination and personal sharing and creates the psychological space into which the couple can move and there develop its potential for growth.

2. "Holding Capacity" which the capacity to bear the anxiety of the emergence of unconscious material and affect through internal processing of projective identifications.

3. The therapist's transitional space is transformed into an expanded psychological space for understanding.

4. The couple finds this space and adapts it deal with current and future anxiety.

- No preference for spouse or another

- No preference for one type of object relationship versus another

- No preference for lifestyle choices

- No preference towards treatment outcome

- It is evenly between the intrapsychic dimensions of each spouse, their interpersonal process and their interaction with us [therapist].

Techniques

Interpretation of defense, anxiety, fantasy, and inner object relations: The "because" clause.

Transference and Countertransference

According to Ezriel, he noted that transference contained 3 aspects

1. a required relationship that defended against

2. an avoided relationship, both of which were preferable to

3. a calamity

It is a useful tool stimulate an inquiring attitude in which can ask the family to join as we move toward understanding.

Use of the therapist's self: Negative capability

Negative Capability fosters our capacity to respond to transference and countertransference.

1. Contextual Transference: therapist reaction to the patient's response to the therapeutic environments, attitude about the frame of treatment, unconscious resistance in general, specific conscious feelings, and behavior towards the therapist as an object for providing a holding situation.

2. Focused Transference: feelings the patient transfers to the therapist as an object for intimate relating.

1. Employs nondirective listening for the emergence of unconscious themes, following the affect, analyzing dream, fantasy material and associations offered by both members of the couple and exploring family history of each partner as it relates to the current couple relationship.

2. Interprets resistance, defense, and conflict.

3. Conceptualized as operating through unconscious object relation systems the support and subvert the marriage.

There are 9 components.

Develop an openness to learning from experience, nurtured in training and supervision.

We [therapist] need to have had personal experience of understanding our own family history and object relations in psychoanalysis or intensive psychotherapy.

Negative Capability: non directive unfocused, receptive attitude

It is an ideal state we need to sink into by simply not doing much and allowing understanding to come from inside our experience.

Setting the Frame

Priority: A secure and consistent environment in which highly sensitive, private feelings and fantasies can be expressed and explored without the threat of actualizing the feared consequences.

Object Relations Couple Therapy