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This chapter reviews evidence that infants can form category representations for spatial relations such as Above, Below, and Between. It discusses two developmental changes. First, category representations for different spatial relations may emerge at different points during development. Second, category representations for spatial relations may initially be limited to the objects depicting relations, but later become more abstract so that various object can be presented in the same relation and the equivalence of the relation is maintained despite this variation. The results are discussed in terms of what versus where processing systems, and the role of language in binding together object and spatial relation information.

The focus here is naturalistic explanations that put great weight on the functioning or malfunctioning of the brain or mind. R. C. Zaehner turned against nature mysticism and put forward several unflattering explanations. He likened extrovertive experience to the mania of manic-depressive illness, but his most promising explanation calls upon an inner mental model of the world. Freud supposed that the extrovertive ‘oceanic feeling’ is a vestige of infantile ideation, and object-relations theorists have suggested that mystical experience aims to repair the psychological damage inflicted by childhood loss. There is good evidence that the brain plays some role in religious and mystical experiences, but the nature of the role is presently unclear. Neuropsychological theories due to V. S. Ramachandran, James Austin, and Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg are raised, but they do not deal convincingly with the full range of extrovertive phenomenology and are best regarded as provisional efforts that will be superseded by more sophisticated theories when neuroscientific understanding of brain function is better understood.

This chapter takes a geographical perspective on a medical biotechnology known as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). WBANs generate, transmit, store, and retrieve information about the biological functioning of patients from any location, allowing doctors to watch their symptoms from computer screens at different locations. The chapter asks what happens to the body when millions of data points are collected from it, and are stored in data center facilities that are increasingly altering urban and rural landscapes. The chapter builds from an ontology based in object relations (e.g. bodies and material, digital information) to propose a different ontology based in extensibility. The political project is potentially vast. When data centers and the landscapes in which they are situated become pieces of the body itself, they must be given greater care and protection by the law.

This introductory chapter explains that the book provides a background on Victorian novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—two writers who have set the fundamental terms for contemporary critical conceptualizations of late nineteenth-century realism, domestic fiction, and psychological novel. Both writers' works demonstrate an abiding interest in character and readerly interiority and in making overarching claims about social and psychic life. It talks about the practices of narration and characterization deployed by Eliot and Hardy, which are more fruitfully uneven and unintegrated than retrospective accounts that place these writers in a realist tradition. The chapter reveals some of the ways in which the profound relationality of novel reading has been foreclosed and opened back up again. In an effort to draw out the relationality of the Victorian novels, the chapter places them in conversation with a key theoretical discourse: British psychoanalysis, whose mid-twentieth- century theorists and practitioners developed “object relations” theory by building from the foundational writings of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.

This chapter argues that ordinary physical objects stand in relations, with ground-consequent dependencies, and that these objects and relations admit of vague boundaries — all as in an abstract KF-structure. However, given our best understanding of quantum mechanics, the world in the small doesn't consist of spatiotemporal objects of the usual sort, and even the bare notion of an individual object is problematic; similar troubles arise for properties and relations and ground-consequent dependencies. Thus, the Second Philosopher fine-tunes the first component of her account to read: a rudimentary logic is true of the world insofar as it is a KF-world, and in many but not all respects, it is.

This chapter discusses the different object relations theories in psychoanalysis. It presents different definitions of object relation theory and examines the controversies surrounding this topic. The rest of the chapter takes a look at the representative object relations theories, as stated by Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, and Otto Kernberg.

This chapter contextualizes the development of DIT in the climate of evidence-based practice, which has been broadly hostile to psychodynamic interventions. It outlines the rationale for the development of this protocol in the work on developing competence frameworks and the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies initiative in the UK. Finally, it reviews its theoretical origins in attachment theory, object relations theory, and Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis.

This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's The Human Condition together with Winnicott's work. It notes the convergence of Winnicott and Arendt on the value of care and concern for the world and for others and argues that there is a case to be made for seeing Arendt as a kind of object-relations theorist whose concepts, along with Winnicott's, call attention to the centrality of public things to democratic life. Read with Winnicott, Arendt emerges as a thinker who is committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.

The Introduction lays out the key terms, organization, and methodology of the book. It details how Freud’s Jaw relies on psychoanalytic object relations theory—in particular theories on part-objects, attachment and dependency (anaclisis), mourning, melancholia, and fetishism. These psychoanalytic concepts are mobilized to probe the psychic life and death of human and nonhuman objects and to throw light upon how illness initiates processes of objectification. Each chapter focuses on a different type of object, which bears a relation to the psychoanalytic lost object: the prosthetic object, the “first object” (the breast), love objects, and reparative objects. Through its examination of autopathographies, including the author’s own autopathographic observations, the book fleshes out a “subjectivity of survival.” For Sigmund Freud survival entailed maintenance and adjustment of his oral prostheses; for Audre Lorde it was bound up with a politics of self-preservation; for Eve Sedgwick it was explicitly a reparative project. The chapter explains how cancer carries psychoanalytic meaning, confirming that death has always occupied the core of psychoanalysis as a tragic discourse.

This chapter introduces drives, which are seen as very individualized, displaceable, and malleable unconscious motivational systems. It is believed that self psychology may actually be considered as a form of object relations theory that rebuffs Sigmund Freud's theory of the drives. This chapter tries to unify a modern theory of drives with the developmental object relations theory model.

This chapter shows that many of Bowen’s female characters have curious relationships with inanimate objects, endowing them with special powers or personal attributes. The pattern of these relations, in which certain objects obtain an unusual significance to their possessors, even, in some cases, to the extent of being preferred over relationships with other people, is obvious in Bowen’s works, yet it eludes the usual definitions of fetishism. Critics attempting to theorize female fetishism have tended to rely on paradigms articulated by Freud (ie erotic) or Marx (ie consumerist). Neither of these constructs, however, adequately describe the relationships with objects that possess overwhelming importance to many of Bowen’s characters and, through these attachments, lead often lead to perverse consequences. Recently, however, German theorist Hartmut Böhme has postulated that fetishism is an entirely European concept, one crucial to our understanding of Modernism. Using Böhme’s axioms of fetishism and Modernism as well as insights from anthropological and theological sources, this chapter explores female characters’ ‘object relations’ (not necessarily in the Freudian sense of the term) in Bowen’s works.

This chapter explains the author's approach to teaching Jung. The chapter argues that Winnicott's notion of a “holding space” between mother and infant applies not only to the analytic dyad but also to the atmosphere in a healthy classroom. A “good enough teacher” establishes secure psychological boundaries and principles of mutual respect to enable students to express themselves freely, raise questions, explore curiosities, and process new knowledge in highly efficient ways. Creating this kind of classroom environment is helpful in any discipline, but the chapter argues it is essential for teaching Jung. Experiential methods like dream interpretation, artistic play, and active imagination are the teaching tools properly suited to the kind of psychological processes that Jungian theory addresses. The best way to employ these tools is to create a sufficiently strong holding space in the classroom for students to learn from their own experiments and discoveries.

This chapter discusses one of Freud's most exciting followers, Melanie Klein, and object-relations theory, focusing on the role of the mother in psychoanalysis. It also shows Freud's discussion of the Fort! Da! game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and presents an account of what Klein's work means and its significance for producing thought about creativity, writing, and art. The chapter argues Klein's view that the child's desires are conflictual and ambivalent, and that the physical mother cannot symbolise them, either in her literality or because thinking depends on ambivalence. Meanwhile, Julia Kristeva contends that, in childbirth, women identify with their mothers, and, in that sense, privileges the role of the woman as mother over other forms of feminism which have been used to attempt to challenge that codification.

This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who argues that objects are central to the developing infant's capacity to relate to the world as an external reality. According to Winnicott, the baby needs its transitional object (the blanket, a toy) to supply it with a kind of object-ivity, or realness. The baby learns about the existence of an external world when it destroys/disavows the object and the object survives. This is object permanence. The chapter also considers the views of Wendy Brown, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt in the context of decades of charting the almost always already overness of democracy's (or of politics') necessary conditions.

This chapter explores the treatment of objects, things, in Marsh’s major Gothic works: The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss. The increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century of collecting and consuming objects offers a context in which boundaries between people and things become uncertain, with objects seemingly exercising a disturbing agency. Marsh’s texts present mutually transforming encounters between objects and characters that question the stability of identity. The chapter suggests that whilst transgressing boundaries between self and not-self is often explored in critical analysis through mesmerism, a more appropriate conceptual framework for Marsh is provided by object relations psychoanalysis, and specifically Christopher Bollas’s notion of ‘transformational objects’. Developing this notion in relation to Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’, the chapter identifies Marsh’s objects as ‘transformational things’, encounters with which often lead to terrifying breakdowns of selfhood, conveying a pervasive sense of existential horror and exposing the precariousness of late-nineteenth-century identity.

Chapter 6 examines how lesbian modernists oppose ideas of artistic impersonality through imbricating intimate affects in the production of their art objects. Objects considered here include literary texts, paintings, houses and interiors. The chapter engages both Michael Hardt’s notion of “corporeal reason” and the object relations psychoanalysis of D.W. Winnicott and Marion Milner to argue that Virginia Woolf, Gluck, and Eileen Gray demonstrate an intense concern with the materiality of artistic production. This preoccupation with “stuff” conveys a visceral, affective appreciation of their art, which serves as a realm in which transgressive sexual desires and identities may be safely articulated. From Gray’s lacquered surfaces to Gluck’s plasticine frames, these modernist art objects are saturated with affect, serving as tangible, material expressions of bodily and emotional intimacy.