Revisiting the Psychoanalytic Object: Introduction

Senior analysts from different theoretical orientations are invited to express their conceptions of the nature of the psychoanalytic object and its place in their clinical approaches. I provide the rationale for this updated survey on the object, drawing on recent procedural notions of its formation, and on the broader range of patients now seeking help whose difficulties foreground use of the analyst-as-object. Certain common themes among the writers emerge, including concern with the dialectic of the separability and unity of subject and object. Most strongly, the object's personalized meaning for each writer, as for all analysts, confirms its robustness and generativity as a psychoanalytic concept and entity.