Forms in Motion: A Personal View of Object Relations

Seligman presents personal imagery and theoretical resonances about “internal object relations.” Listening to patients, he is often imagining presences in motion, in choreography, spatialization, and sometimes pictorialization of bodies experiencing and acting with people, places, things, and other environmental features. Emotions are typically engaged. He describes “shapey, blobby forms” that might organize into more specific images or narratives, which may be quite fantastical, quite realistic, or in varied blends of these and other modes. These experiences are linked to Freudian and Kleinian conceptions of phantasy and contemporary relational theories of implicit schemas, representations of relationships, and the like. Case illustrations are offered.