Breathing together: Needed relationships and complex selfobjects

ABSTRACT

In this paper the author extends his metatheory of needed relationships to posit a more complex form of selfobject connection than has been previously theorized. He argues that there are degrees of selfobject connectedness and that for the fullest, most transformative connection to be actualized certain conditions in the patient’s experience of the analyst need to be met. The co-creation of such conditions amounts to a new needed relationship—a transformational intersubjective medium—uniquely co-created and unpredictably emergent within each analytic dyad, which somehow comes to address a traumatic relational breach in the original parent-child field and restores an ethic of care, lawfulness, competence and love that was the patient’s original birthright. This amounts to a fully relational self psychology, but a more forward edge relationality than that of mainstream Relational theory, which, at least historically, has placed more emphasis on repetition and enactment than on what the author calls the needed relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Complex selfobject
• needed relationship
• fittedness
• specificity of recognition and connection
• emergence

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Stern

Steven Stern is a faculty member, training analyst and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (NYC). He is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Maine Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine and serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. He has been a frequent contributor to the contemporary psychoanalytic literature, with a particular interest in theoretical integration. His book, Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing was published by Routledge in 2017 in the “Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series.” A second book, Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing, is in preparation, also for publication by Routledge. Dr. Stern practices in Portland, ME with specializations in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision and consultation.