Object relational disturbances that may underlie the diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder in adults

Extensive case material is used to show how some adult patients who have been diagnosed with and medicated for attention-deficit disorder (ADD) may be actually suffering from underlying unconscious object relational conflicts that interfere with their ego-functioning, creating an inhibition of basic concentration, focus, expression, and learning. Early childhood experiences of trauma and neglect can create destructive patterns of projective identification based paranoia, guilt, and intense anxiety. The author proposes that these patients have to sacrifice their own identity, psychological organization, and ability to learn or teach in order to keep the peace with others. In order to avoid conflict, difference, and uncertainty, these patients do whatever they can to placate, please, and not disturb the object. However, they often end up extremely resentful, oppositional, and passive-aggressive in reaction. The overwhelming anxiety these patients experience in relationship to the object and to their own internalized demanding critic blocks their ability to learn and grow. In addition, new knowledge, mastery, and creativity are seen as dangerous, forced upon them, or bringing unsafe attention to them. So, in defense, they adapt an inert, scattered, or formless way of living to keep under the radar. This paper advocates the psychoanalytic treatment of such internal conflicts over the popular diagnosis of ADD. Difficulties of learning, attention, concentration, and organization can be better understood and treated as a set of core psychological issues open to gradual working through and healing rather than neurological defects that can only be controlled or managed with strong medication and behavioral exercises.     

Body-ownership for actively operated non-corporeal objects

Rubber-hand and virtual-hand illusions show that people can perceive body ownership for objects under suitable conditions. Bottom-up approaches assume that perceived ownership emerges from multisensory matching (e.g., between seen object and felt hand movements), whereas top-down approaches claim that novel body parts are integrated only if they resemble some part of a permanent internal body representation. We demonstrate that healthy adults perceive body ownership for a virtual balloon changing in size, and a virtual square changing in size or color, in synchrony with movements of their real hand. This finding is inconsistent with top-down approaches and amounts to an existence proof that non-corporeal events can be perceived as body parts if their changes are systematically related to one’s actions. It also implies that previous studies with passive-stimulation techniques might have underestimated the plasticity of body representations and put too much emphasis on the resemblance between viewed object and real hand.     

The countertransference impact of autistic defence in an otherwise neurotic patient

This paper investigates the question of why, in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a patient with encapsulated autistic pathology, the steady maintenance of a therapeutically neutral stance can be especially difficult. Transference and countertransference vicissitudes are examined. The author notices that the patient's intolerance of ‘opposites’ (cf. Tustin, 1986), combined with extreme antipathy to having that intolerance noticed, can elicit corresponding, and potentially destabilizing, countertransference reactions. These reactions comprise an unstable tension between co‐existing pressures towards fusion with, or expulsion of, the patient, their co‐existence under further pressure to remain unnoticed. Until perceived, this state of affairs risks collusion with the pressure either to merge with or to expel the patient, and compromises the capacity to notice the detail of the transference process and even to notice co‐existent positive and negative transference images. Detailed clinical illustration is given, including a session where it was difficult to notice the patient's experience of a couple as a combined object. The author finds these observations of bipolar countertransference tensions illuminated by Green's concepts of positive and negative narcissism and of the disobjectalizing function, and specifically accounted for by Ribas's theory of autism as radical drive defusion.     

Infants’ recognition of objects using canonical color

We explored infants’ ability to recognize the canonical colors of daily objects, including two color-specific objects (human face and fruit) and a non-color-specific object (flower), by using a preferential looking technique. A total of 58 infants between 5 and 8 months of age were tested with a stimulus composed of two color pictures of an object placed side by side: a correctly colored picture (e.g., red strawberry) and an inappropriately colored picture (e.g., green-blue strawberry). The results showed that, overall, the 6- to 8-month-olds showed preference for the correctly colored pictures for color-specific objects, whereas they did not show preference for the correctly colored pictures for the non-color-specific object. The 5-month-olds showed no significant preference for the correctly colored pictures for all object conditions. These findings imply that the recognition of canonical color for objects emerges at 6 months of age.     

Goodbye and farewell: Siegel vs. Feyerabend∗

The discussion between Searle and the Churchlands over whether or not symbolmanipulating computers generate semantics will be confronted both with the rulesceptical considerations of Kripke/Wittgenstein and with Wittgenstein's privatelanguage argument in order to show that the discussion focuses on the wrong place: meaning does not emerge in the brain. That a symbol means something should rather be conceived as a social fact, depending on a mutual imputation of linguistic competence of the participants of a linguistic practice to one another. The alternative picture will finally be applied to small children, animals, and computers as well.     

Individual Differences in Child Kaleidoblock Responses

The relationship between self-esteem and parental identification was investigated. The hypothesis that self-esteem is positively correlated with parental identification was supported for female college students by two out of three self-esteem measures. For male subjects one social self-esteem measure correlated negatively with maternal identification and a self-concept measure correlated positively. No relationship between self-esteem and paternal identification existed for males: hence the hypothesis was refuted. The importance of social self-esteem in the feminine self-concept and its basis in parental identification is emphasized in the discussion.     

Seduction,date rape,and aborted surrender

Abstract

This paper clarifies the dual-layered nature of the “demon lover complex,” with its background of both pre-Oedipal trauma and Oedipal-level desire. It draws on an object relations understanding of the unconscious and dissociated addiction to an internal demon object that has derivations in the personalities of the actual parents, and in the internalization of these parents. The dramatic case of early trauma compounded by adult date rape trauma serves to illustrate how a “developmental mourning process” in treatment can resolve such trauma. It also illustrates how reparation with the mother that partially heals pre-Oedipal trauma cannot immunize anyone against Oedipal-level attractions to a “demon lover” father, as represented in a displacement, resulting in victimized behavior, and in an aborted surrender to heterosexual desire. However, this victimization can be resolved, as seen in the clinical illustration, when the psychoanalyst has an understanding of the mourning process in developmental terms, working with a natural interaction between mourning and transference evolutions in treatment. The case also demonstrates the transitional object role of the psychoanalyst who is involved with the healing of pre-Oedipal trauma through mourning.     

You can't miss what you've never had: Can you?: The challenges and struggles of single parenthood from a psychoanalytic perspective

The issue of the growth of single-parent families has been in the forefront of political, social and moral debate in recent years. Children from single-parent families tend to be over-represented in clinic populations. Yet this state of My being may be no more potentially pathological than the nuclear family, which can become conceptually idealized The aim of this paper is to look behind the statistics and examine the impact on children of life in a single-parent family, to explore how this may be managed, and to look for potentiating factors which can enable good-enough development to unfold. Case material is used to illustrate the theme.     

Mirroring,imitation, identification: the sense of self in relation to the mother's internal world

The phenomenon of neonatal imitation, and the use of mutual imitation by mother and baby in the service of attunement, are considered in relation to psychoanalytic theories of mirroring, imitation and identification. Material from infant observation and from the treatment of two children on the autistic spectrum is discussed in terms of the suggestion that developmental imitation implies a perceived position of balance between the external baby and the mother's supposed internal occupant. This is seen as making possible introjective identification and assimilation, with the enrichment of the sense of identity, in contrast to the kind of imitation involving mimicry, in which adhesive or projective identification may be operative.     

Frustration and disappointment

The paper describes research on children’s responses to failures of gratification. Although this has always been an important area of consideration in psychoanalytic thinking, arguments are put forward for the child’s actual feelings of disappointment being significant in ways that have yet to be fully realised theoretically and clinically within Kleinian object relations. Since Freud first used the term ‘frustration’, it has been applied in psychoanalysis as a means by which to describe in an undifferentiated way all those responses to failures of gratification that have an aggressive content. It will be argued that, in a context of the historical shift in thinking from drive to relational models, there is now perhaps scope to posit the existence instead of two discrete object relational positions towards such failures of aim – that frustrated responses can be differentiated in important structural and developmental ways from disappointed ones, by suggesting that the former are schizoid, whilst the latter are depressive in quality. To try and begin to test the hypothesis that there might be an object relational distinction between feelings of frustration and feelings of disappointment, selected process notes from two training cases became the subject of a combined piece of clinical and theoretical research. I will outline how this research was undertaken and present the findings that arose from the clinical part of it. With the use of a content analysis, a method for gathering interesting quantitative data about the children’s various responses to the failures of gratification was arrived at.