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Dr. Panajian will discuss through clinical case presentations patients with severe narcissistic organization, who are dominated by fragile psychotic structures and narcissistic organizations with less fragile structures. Patients with severe fragile structures deny desires, sexuality, and emotions. They seek anesthesia and non-existence. They deny awareness of inner world and mental contents. Mental life is expelled. They defend themselves from intrusions of living. Murderous conscience dominates them. They are very frightened due to being unaware of their defenses. Relationships become very intense due to their own fragility and functioning mechanically. The lack of healthy narcissistic filters causes them to keep us out. They live in massive withdrawal and disconnections. The denial of needs, including the need for food lead some of them hide their anorexia. Patients with less fragile structures seek unity with others. Impossibility of unity leads one to seek pacified merger. Such pacification triggers unpredictable rage, intellectual overstimulation, and exploitation of others. Their destructive aspects generate propaganda against dependency on the analyst. Psychic deadness dominates them when they face aloneness.
Dr. Panajian will demonstrate how the analyst oscillates between environment mother and object-relations. In order to construct healthy structures, the analyst’s narcissism and seeking power must be at minimal. Generating a rhythm of partnership with the patient is a must for building healthy structures. Deconstructing oneself and showing that one is capable to think and differentiate is a must. The analyst needs to be supportive in allowing the patient to choose the distance between them. Shared subjects and interests that are not sexualized help the patient to build healthy narcissistic structures. This type of playful space allows the internalization of a non-defensive analyst. Healthy structures are built in the transitional area of open dialogue.
Saturdays at 9:30 – 11:00 am (Pacific/Seattle)
4 Sessions, Beginning on October 17
Upcoming In-Person Series
Donald Meltzer is one of the central theorists in the object relations tradition. His writing is especially focused on the nature of the psychoanalytic process and the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship. In this course we will read selections from three of his books, “The Psychoanalytic Process,” “Sexual States of Mind,” and “Studies in Extended Metapsychology,” his exploration of Bion’s work. Meltzer’s work has a great deal to offer in thinking about our experience as therapists.
Wednesdays at 7:30 – 9:00 pm (Pacific/Seattle)
12 Sessions, Beginning on October 21
Explore British Object Relations Psychology
From the foundations of psychoanalytic psychology to present-day clinical practice
Explore British Object Relations Psychology
From the foundations of psychoanalytic psychology to present-day clinical practice
What is Object Relations?
British Object Relations is a branch of psychoanalytic theory that originated in the United Kingdom with analysts such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. It is based on the understanding that human emotional and mental development is fundamentally influenced by early experience, particularly by the quality of the relationship with primary caregivers (the first “objects”). British Object Relations explicates the presence of a rich internal world, starting in early infancy and continuing throughout life, which both mirrors early object relations and continues to profoundly affect a person’s experience and functioning in the world.
Psychoanalytic therapy within this tradition offers a way of understanding these early organizations and, through the therapeutic relationship, seeks to build the capacity for thinking about them that can help the patient “grow” a mind—enabling an empathic and effective ability to work with one’s own experience. In a simplified version, the theory of object relations understands that infants are born with a “primitive” way of organizing their mind, and that is through the relationship with their “objects”, mainly a mother (later a therapist in a maternal function) that they begin to form their mind in a way that is able to tolerate the outside world, and subsequently grow.
What is Center for Object Relations?
Founded in 1994 in Seattle, Washington, the Center for Object Relations began as a small group of clinicians who met regularly to study British Object Relations Theory. Over the years, that small group expanded and evolved.
Today, COR is a thriving community of lifelong learners from the Northwest and throughout the World, offering courses and quality continued education with a focus on clinical, experiential application of BOR theory.
COR welcomes you to join our classes, events, webinars, consult groups, or infant observation groups.
Our Values
It is very important to be aware that you may never be satisfied with your analytic career if you feel that you are restricted to what is narrowly called a ‘scientific’ approach. You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable.
— Wilfred Bion, A Seminar Held in Paris
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