Originality,Dread, and Object Usage: Commentary on Papers by Sarah Mendelsohn and Deborah Dowd

Both Deborah Dowd and Sarah Mendelsohn capture the fraught experience of staying near a patient’s dread. I discuss dread as an engagement with unrepresented trauma. With each case I interpret a critical clinical moment as an instance of Winnicott’s object usage, by which the patient leaves omnipotence and finds externality. I introduce a crucial meaning of object usage that I find only implicit in Winnicott’s text: Not only must the analyst survive the patient’s destructiveness, but the analyst also must be disrupted by the patient’s unrepresented trauma. Their patients’ experience of this disruption positions each of these analysts as an other who can be used.