The Negative Selfobject

ABSTRACT

The paper suggests that the selfobject concept includes very important developmental experiences that can be understood most helpfully as negative selfobject. The powerful shaping function of caretaker responses can often shape the emergent self as bad, worthless, depleted and defective. These inner shapes of the self are derived from interactions with caretakers in which the affect of the caretaker include rage, censure, indifference. They occur in the context of the child’s need for affirmation and response. Rather than cause deficits or result in accommodation, these interactions directly shape the emergent self in distorted ways. It is important for the treating therapist of such patients to understand that such shaping is not defensive or secondary, that it is a primary effect of caretaker affects that the child could not control. Treatment strategies are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Negative selfobject
• selfobject
• parental (or caretaker) affect
• shape of the self
• interactions in development

Notes

¹ The early traumatic disillusionment in the strength or perfection of the idealized selfobject may result in diffuse problems of self soothing that become the basis of some addictions, The absence or deficit of such capacities in the individual may then result in a turn to a chemical substance to supply the psychological function that is lacking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David M. Terman

David M. Terman, M.D., is a past Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis where he had been a Training and Supervising Analyst for the over 40 years. Dr. Terman had his undergraduate and medical education at the University of Chicago and his psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.  He has contributed to several central aspects of clinical and developmental theory of self psychology. He reconceptualized the Oedipus complex in self psychological terms, and he was one of the first to note the importance of positive experience in forming psychological structure in development. He has also explored the history of anti-Semitism from a self psychological perspective, and he has coauthored and edited a book with Charles Strozier and James Jones  on the psychology of fundamentalism and other political and social forces, The Fundamentalist Mindset (Oxford University Press: 2010). He has applied his work on paranoia to an understanding of some of the features of classic  psychoanalytic theory. He is now retired from clincial practice but continues to teach, supervise, and write  on selected theoretical issues and in the area of applied psychoanalysis.