object (Objekt)

object **(Objekt)

** The thing, which may be a person, body part, symbol, image, or idea, through which the drive seeks to attain its aim, namely its satisfaction or extinction (albeit temporary). In choosing this term, Freud, Sigmund wanted to make the point that the drives (the psychological organization of the instincts) do not make a distinction between animate and inanimate, partial and whole, or even real and imagined. The notion of the object is central to psychoanalysis, particularly its theory of sexuality. At the most basic level, object choice defines sexual orientation (whether homosexual or heterosexual); but it also defines the nature of the sexual perversions (any form of sexuality not organized around a relationship to another person). Since object choice is said to occur in childhood, the theory of the object is particularly important to child psychoanalysts like Klein, Melanie. Objects can be both internal and external to the body---hunger, for example, feels as if it is located in the pit of the stomach, so it is internal; whereas sensation or touch, which is experienced through the skin, is external. The distinction between the internal and external object is by no means straightforward, however, because some objects appear external but only function if they are rendered internal, such as the thumb which the child sucks in order to go to sleep. Objects can thus be effective and ineffective and therefore subject to love and hate, often at the same time, a state that is known in psychoanalysis as ambivalence. Klein called the ineffective objects ‘bad objects’ and the effective ones ‘good objects’ and based her theory of child development around the child’s need to learn to deal with the crises the bad objects apparently represent to them. The classic example of the bad object is the breast that does not provide milk. Understandably, perhaps, to the hungry child such an object can be an object of hatred. What should also be observed is that for the child the breast is not necessarily a part of the object called ‘mummy’, and for this reason it is known as a part object. The theory of how the child relates to a particular object (part or whole) is known as object relations theory: it is concerned with not only the feeling of love or hate towards the object, but also its placement (introjection or hyperobject, i.e. internal or external), and the way they act on or with the object. Further Reading: J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967), translated as The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973).