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.