The Object Relations View

Topic of envy is continued as it relates to D.W. Winnicott’s understanding of mother-infant relationship and the “good enough” mother.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler continues the topic of envy and its relationship with the saying “biting the hand that feeds you,” especially in clinical therapeutic situation.

Envy is a powerful and difficult clinical topic. Yet Envy pervades our lives, and rivals with Jealousy for its killer instinct and terror filled hunger. After Freud’s more narrow understanding of envy in terms of penis envy, Melanie Klein was the first prominent theorist to expand our view of envy, and lay it at the doorstep of psychoanalysis as the dish “de jour” that haunts our daily life.  From breast envy to womb envy, Klein sufficiently countered the unique status of penis envy as an instinctual main course on the envy menu.

What is a Writer? How to Know whether you're a Writer from the inside  out? What is the creative process, versus performing for publication,  versus the Compulsion to Create, and versus writing blocks or creative  blocks?  What role do dreams have in understanding and resolving writing  blocks?

Dr. Kavaler-Adler addresses Cravings versus Yearnings in Bulimia and Anorexia, as well as the multilevel hunger in both.   Psychic Visualization technique (used consistently in Dr. Kavaler-Adler's monthly groups) helps to hone in on these topics. During Psychic visualizations, one's stomach area focuses on dialogues with hunger, hate, rage, and anger towards Internal Others; while one's heart focuses on dialogues with the love, longings, yearnings, loss, yearnings, and grief for Internal Others. Connecting to the emotional hunger cravings in the stomach brings up very different communication than focusing on the yearnings, longings, and passionate love desire in the heart.   Anorexic people locate the absence of the other in the oral cavity, and the therapist working with them can feel the aloneness and emotional hunger in the oral cavity area. Emotional need is channeled in oral channels rather than through heart channels. Other Eating Disorders may have similar dissociative body displacements.  Splitting and conflict between cravings and yearnings are experienced by participants of the Psychic Visualizations, with Developmental Mourning that integrates the heart and stomach psychic channels.

Time Management From the Inside Out: Playing with Time and the Internal Objects We Project onto Time

Mourning, Grief, Loss and Deprivation at the Time Of Covid

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler discusses the subject of envy, contrasting it with admiration. And, sometimes, people confuse envy with jealousy. Unconscious envy can be painful, hateful, and destructive.

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler discusses how various couples differ developmentally. Sometimes, two people create the enmeshed/ psychically merged relationship, and some others  who are two separate and differentiated people -- create a couple, where each person has their opinions, fears, and yearnings for each other.

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler discusses how we can project our internal world's accusers, judges, and prosecutors onto corona virus itself, producing the terrors of annihilation.

For more information about this topic and about Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing/ creative process groups, visit www.kavaleradler.com. In this group process, the internal editor comes alive through transference, associations, and affectively laden memories that recreate the parental personals behind the internal editor persona. The repetitive intrapsychic pattern also comes alive in the pattern of interactions within the group. Transferences emerge and are repetitively worked through between the members of the group.

For more information about this topic and about Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing/ creative process groups, visit www.kavaleradler.com. In this group process, the internal editor comes alive through transference, associations, and affectively laden memories that recreate the parental personals behind the internal editor persona. The repetitive intrapsychic pattern also comes alive in the pattern of interactions within the group. Transferences emerge and are repetitively worked through between the members of the group.

For more information about this topic and about Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing/ creative process groups, visit www.kavaleradler.com. In this group process, the internal editor comes alive through transference, associations, and affectively laden memories that recreate the parental personals behind the internal editor persona. The repetitive intrapsychic pattern also comes alive in the pattern of interactions within the group. Transferences emerge and are repetitively worked through between the members of the group.

Utilizing Fairbairn’s (1952) concepts of the “internal saboteur” and the “anti-libidinal ego,” Dr. Kavaler-Adler discusses the “internal editor,” which haunts the would-be writer (or any other creative person) - by censoring what he/she might wish to say before he/she can say it. The internal editor is a composite derived from a multitude of parental (judgmental) ‘introjects’ that prompt shame and guilt in the face of creative desire.

When we take a look through an object relations lens at pathological dynamics related to the creative process, we see that those with neurotic conditions can often suffer from creative blocks, or in the case of writers, from writing blocks.  This relates to repression processes that operate defensively at an unconscious level.  By contrast we see those who are amazingly prolific in creative work, who may suffer from early developmental arrests in the preoedipal period, who have not reached a psychic level of containing repression, but who repeat dissociated preoedipal trauma experience within the content and format of their creative work.  They may experience "the compulsion to create" (Kavaler-Adler, 1993, 2000, & 2013).  Those with "the compulsion to create" are not merely writing, dancing, or painting, out of a free creative inspiration, but are rather compelled to keep turning to the creative process to express the pain, rage, and anguish of primal trauma that has resulted in primal level loss that cannot be successfully mourned.  In fact the manic intensity and rate of the creative process can reflect a pathological mourning state, in which the artist is compelled to repeat their trauma in an infinite variety of ways in their work, but no matter the infinite variety of expression, the unresolved trauma still remains, and the theme of it is repeated continuously.   Also, due to the primal trauma and its unresolved loss, the artist's or writer's relationships in the world often break down, or fail to sustain their support and intimacy, so that the creative process itself becomes the external container for the anguished internal world and its dissociated (or "split off") trauma.  Creative work can then be the outlet for an externalized version of the internal world trauma, which may not be processed and edited by an observing ego.  The creative process becomes the fantasy containing mother that the artist never adequately had in infancy or in the separation-individuation period.  However, all that is poured out into the external "toilet breast" mother (a Kleinian term) in the creative process is not necessarily shaped by an observing ego, so it takes on the dynamic of Ronald Fairbairn's (1952) "exorcism" rather than being a locus of processing the affects and memories of loss and trauma, so that true mourning can succeed and integrate the self.  Instead, the self that is already split can become further fragmented.  Brilliant modern painting and poetry can be devised from such fragmented parts.  Just look at the work of Picasso.  Or look at the work of such writers as Emily Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or Emily Dickinson, as seen in my books on the creative process: The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Routledge, 1993, Other Press 2000, &ORI Academic Press 2013) and The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (Routledge 1996, & ORI Academic Press, 2015). On the other hand, in writing or creative blocks, the person with the wish and often talent to create is often stymied by an unconscious fear of expressing anger at those who have opposed their self-expression in childhood, but usually at an oedipal or post oedipal level.  Being blocked in their ability to express themselves freely can reflect a submission as well, to those who opposed their free self-expression.

Psychic Dialectic: The Object Relations View is the 16th episode of the educational series related on object relations view of one's personal development. It is presented by Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, who is a practicing psychoanalyst and the founder of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in NYC. She is also an author of five books and over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters related to various psychoanalytic clinical phenomena.

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler continues the series "The Object Relations View" with this small educational podcast episode on importance of the "internal father" for the development of female creativity. For further understanding of the topic, read "The Creative Mystique: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers" and "The Compulsion to Create" - both earlier  Routledge books by Dr. Kavaler-Adler, republished by ORI Academic Press in 2013 and 2014.

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler discuses the phenomenon of narcissism from the object relations view. Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a psychoanalyst and an object relations  theorist for over 35 years. She is the founder and the executive director of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in NYC.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler offers the psychoanalytic/ object relations clinical theory approach to eating disorders.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler discusses the object relations view on anxiety as a repressed or dissociated state of fear of anger, rage, and loss.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler, founder of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (NYC) discusses the view on depression from the perspective of the object relations clinical theory. She describes depression as not something we need to "get rid of", but as a defensive state against one's feelings of hurt, guilt, anger - often related to one's internal world's relationships.

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler discusses so-called Klein-Winnicott dialectic, which enriched the object relations clinical theory and technique, as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott complemented each other, although they were perceived to be rather polarized.

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler explains the concept of psychic regret as it understood by the object relations practitioners.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler, Exec Director of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis explains the concept of the Demon-lover, and how it is related to maturation of one's psyche, to separation-individuation process, to creativity, and possibility for change.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler talks about bad objects  (in our psyche) and how loyalty to those bad objects explains our feelings about the world and our behavior .

Through all our lives, we experience losses, which we mourn. In a healthy case of developmental mourning, we are able to grow, personally and psychically, while in pathological mourning, we are a subject of melancholia.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler opens up a difficult topic of fear of success (which is related to self-sabotage), and describes it through clinical examples.

Self-sabotage can present itself in different shapes and forms, even it can present itself as "fear of success". Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler provides very accessible clinical examples of self-sabotage, and she explains the intra-psychic play of our primary objects, and loyalty to bad objects.

Do you have problems meeting the dead lines? Making time lines? Both? Are you always ready for your presentation or an exam weeks and weeks ahead? Are you able to work only under significant time pressure? Dr. Kavaler Adler opens up the difficult topic of perception of time as an object or a persona, which can be felt as persecutory or holding.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler provides explanation and clinical examples of the phenomenon of projective identification, as well as offers explanation of differences between projection and projective identification. Understanding these differences is super-important in clinical practice and in everyday life.

This is the first part of the educational series on the Object Relations theory, theorists, and clinical technique offered by Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, founder and executive director of the Object Relations Institute in NYC.  Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and psychotherapist with 35 years of experience, and is a prolific writer.  She is known to be an American Object Relations theorist, continuing the tradition of the British Object Relations theorists.