About Center for Object Relations
Our Mission & Leadership at COR
At the foundation of all that makes us human is relationship. We all began in relationship to the mother, in the womb, and from birth onward there is a development through relationship, and the absence of relationship, into the formation of our inner world. As we grow, there is complexity to how we develop through relationship, and it is in this complex experience of presence/absence, pain/relief, taking-in/getting-out that many of the emotional, physical, and mental problems develop over time. Often, many of the modern therapeutic modalities do not address the complexities in the development of the internal world of our patients. And so while at times there may be short-term progress, many of these patients return again and again to treatment, or at worse give up, losing hope of ever finding help.
The purpose of Center for Object Relations is to help therapists, and anyone else who is interested, to begin to get to know the intricacies of human development through the frame of British Object Relations. We believe BOR is a lens that is missing within many current therapeutic modalities, and it is one way that has been found to have success with patients in ways that other treatments miss.
Center for Object Relations mission is to extend to the broader community an awareness, knowledge, use and understanding of the British Object Relations view of (1) child development, (2) the resulting internal world in every human being, and (3) its expression in human relationships.
We are a membership-supported, not-for-profit organization. Whether on the Board of Directors or part of a Committee, our leaders volunteer their time to facilitate learning and to build a sense of community. We invite anyone interested in volunteering to contact us.
Developmental Learning is Experiential
A fundamental aspect of our approach to learning the emotional complexity of “listening to one’s self, listening to another” is experiential. This type of work is an art that is practiced through the tangible reality of here-and-now experience. At COR, much of our focus is on incorporating didactic training with lived experience.
Our ongoing series, Saturday Dialogues, is a regular practice of a clinician presenting case material to a discussant and to the attendees, to provide an in-depth look into a patient-therapist dyad. Infant Observation provides a real time witnessing the psychic and emotional development of a baby through a year-long practice of weekly visits with a mother-infant dyad. All of our courses heavily incorporate space for looking at both the case material of the students and instructors. And within all of this, we believe it is vital to the therapeutic work for the clinician to get to know their own unconscious process.
At the Foundation of All that Makes us Human is Relationship
We view life through the lens of relationship, in how we all began in relationship to a mother, in the womb. From birth onward there is development through relationship, and in the absence of relationship, and this begins the formation of our inner world. We come to see that as we grow, there is complexity in how we develop through relationship, and it is in this complex experience of presence/absence, pain/relief, taking-in/getting-out that many of the emotional, physical, and mental qualities and problems develop over time.
Often, many of the modern therapeutic modalities do not address the complexities in the development of the internal world of our patients. And so while there at times may be short-term progress, many of these patients return again and again to treatment, or at worse give up, losing hope of ever finding help.
The purpose of Center for Object Relations is to help therapists, and anyone else who is interested, to begin to get to know the intricacies of human development through the frame of British Object Relations. British Object Relations is a lens that is in the formational core of many current therapeutic modalities, and offers a “compass as a way to navigate” (language from Franco Scabbiolo) the internal world of ourselves and our patients.
Partnership with The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology
Center for Object Relations is in partnership with The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology to offer an advanced concentration to students in their Masters of Arts in Counseling Psychology program that is specific to British Object Relations theory and practice. As a part of this concentration, master’s level students first participate in a year-long Infant Observation practicum. Their second year is then participating in our Foundations of British Object Relations course, that is providing an introduction to BOR theory alongside clinical experience in their internship.
To learn more about this opportunity for Master’s students, please visit the Seattle School webpage : Concentration in Psychoanalytic Psychology.
