Object Relations Theory & Christian Views

Object relations theory is a branch of psychology that focuses on anxiety disorders associated with unsatisfactory ways that individuals may cope with the world, owing to their level of cognitive development. How individuals perceive their place in the world and their ability to deal with the wash of experience, as well as their status vis-a-vis other individuals, is of special concern to object-relations theory. Cashdan (1988, p. 3) says that object relations "may be internal or external, fantasied or real, but they essentially center around interactions with other human beings." Object-relations theory, which has psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic, and behaviorist attributes, is, as far as Cashdan is concerned, "a reaction against the Freudian motivational concept of instinctual drives" (p. 23), in favor of an understanding of complex relationships that govern human experience and behavior, particularly early childhood relationships. The focus is not Freudian because the emphasis is not merely on the internal proc

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by the individual's autonomous understanding of both limits and possibilities of connectedness with otherness. In the life of faith, this understanding may acquire interpretations of spiritual and/or ethical dimension. That fact that such interpretation profoundly entails the individual's social experience cannot be overestimated and has absorbed the attention of various commentators. Consider Black's (1993) object relations interpretation of religion, which begins with an assertion that religion is a social construction, replete with metaphors (= objects, = symbols) that have analogues in classical psychoanalysis but that are grounded in immediate individual experience. This experience takes the form of cultural perceptions that explain (or, in Klein's formulation, contain) the whole range of emotion and fantasy that inform the enterprise of individual interpretation, projection, and splitting alike. Perceptions, or inner images, also figure into Hyrck's brief discussion of the varieties of Christian images of God, whether as cosmic sadist, sending evil to torture humankind or as the suffering Christ, containing (and thereby resolving, as Tillich would have it) human evil. Hyrck says that these images are consistent with what Kl
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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