The Phenomenology of Object Usage
There’s an interesting tension that comes in reading the work of Donald Winnicott firsthand. On the one, his work is remarkably insightful and, though it dabbles in the commonly explored psychoanalytic terrain of the “unverifiable”, rings of considerable truth each time I read it. However, this truth needs to be parsed through a language that comes clunkily in and out of a poetic, phenomenological precision and the jargon heavy world of psychoanalytic argot, forging a distance between lived experience and the ways in which it may be described.
One concept of Winnicott’s that seems to fall firmly into this camp is that of object usage. The notion appears repeatedly throughout his writing and is often itself an object of careful consideration in the work of many contemporary psychoanalysts (Mitchell, Ghent, Ogden, etc.) who have looked to Winnicott to refine, redefine, and expand the conceptual framework and territories of psychoanalytic practice. The idea can be remarkably subtle in its explication of how we chart the course of natural human development, as well as the way it represents how we likely navigate the terrain of the psychotherapeutic encounter. The turn from object usage to object relating displays a suggestiveness that, reading the passages in which Winnicott outlines these ideas, I feel something visceral which calls me out of a deadened sense of the way the world operates, into a linguistic paradigm for rendering some understood phenomena into a new kind of movement that feels of a truth with the lived experience it is intending to translate.
I think the challenge with Winnicott at times (and with much psychoanalytic writing for that matter) is that one must do the work of finding the lived-in experiential quality within the concept. That, at face value, talking about the idea of “object usage” runs the risk of dulling some felt experience of the world and what it means to be in relation to other bodies, especial those bodies which hold considerable influence over the eventual satisfaction and propulsive drive of our own needs and development. What Winnicott, and psychoanalysis more broadly, misses in its unique approach to describing phenomena is something of the lived quality of being with other beings, sharing (either physical or virtual) space, moving to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. The move from usage to relatedness may be framed, I think more accurately, in contemporary jargon as the move from objects to intersubjectivity. Though even this language can sometimes only blandly disclose the deep sense of connectedness that can infuse the therapeutic encounter.
This somewhat reactive position came to me recently in a peer supervision group I participate in. One of my co-participants was remarking somewhat negatively on the way in which we are “used” by our clients. The word was being uttered more descriptively than with a clinical eye to object-relations, but I noticed an initial defensiveness arise as my mind immediately jumped to the passages in Winnicott I had been reading mere hours earlier. However, something in me realized that her troubled use of the word, and the aversive look that came along with it (both—I think—offered with some dose of irony), were right in some kind of way. There is something unbecoming about that phrasing that seemingly undermines the utility of the concept. But, if that is the case, how might we better conceptualize what Winnicott might actually have been trying to say, particularly when trying to reframe it philosophically and phenomenologically?
It seems to me one possible way to do this is through Heidegger’s notion of being-with, outlined in Division I Chapter 4 of Being and Time. Heidegger’s being-with acknowledges that we are never really quite alone, as “the-world” dimension of being-in-the-world, necessarily includes the quality of being in the world with others, even in moments when those others aren’t physically present (similar to what might otherwise be called internalization, but remember that for Heidegger we don’t internalize our relations, we are our relations). The move from object usage to object relatedness then might be something like coming into the possibility for authentic relation to another. There is some complexity here, as I don’t know how much Heidegger’s theoretical approach would credit the child who is able to effectively individuate from and recognize the respective subjectivity of the parent as having attained an authentic stance with regard to this quality of being-with. However, I could see it as also being entirely plausible that though authenticity may necessarily be a developmental achievement linked to something like the maturity necessary to take over Dasein as one’s own, it does also seem reasonable to suggest that though we are born into the world and immediately become situated in its various cultural and historical constructs, the possibility for inauthenticity also may necessarily be a developmental achievement.
Taken in this light, we could consider that the developmental transitions outlined by Winnicott could precede the individual’s ability to come into their own inauthenticity, that is precede the capacity for being impacted by what might be referred to in Lacanian terms as the Symbolic Order. I have little sense to this point what we might be inclined to call a period preceding this developmental inauthenticity, though Loewald’s notion of the “primal density” seems a plausible suggestion. This could help to explain the intensity of the relational components of the work that can be felt by clinician and client alike, as outlined in relationally informed interpretations of the enactment of this particular feature in the context of the therapeutic relationship.
It seems to me in writing this, that if we want to render object-realting in terms of the felt experience of living in the world with others, we are talking in some sense about dimensions of the presence and absence of love. I think there’s merit to thinking about this along a four-phase kind of development that looks something like: immature usage to immature relatedness, followed by mature usage and mature relatedness. The two immature stages could be used as framing relational development from birth to sometime in adolescence. Immature usage is what we enter into, wherein the infant wouldn’t be expected to understand the parent as a separate entity or, in its extreme dependency, have any sense of what separateness might even entail; this then evolves later into a state of more awareness of the self-other divide—usually occurring as a toddler—where the child begins to understand and explore independence and begins to “work through” the feelings of separation that exist between themselves and other entities. The child will then oscillate between these phases over the course of their childhood and pre-adolescent years, dancing between usage and relatedness depending on factors informed by, but not limited, to things like self-concept; the support or lack of support in the developmental environment; quality of experiences with others; or their available affective range. All of which, I think, come in some capacity to determine the experience of the developing child in their ability to give and receive love.
Mature usage and relatedness would come later, at a developmental point where a person could be said to be capable of having the capacity to “take over” their own being. “Usage”, in this representation of the term, would take on a modified quality, assuming the individual in question had met the developmental achievement of being able to differentiate themselves in a more or less conscious sense from others. To get to a descriptive understanding of this version of usage, it might be helpful to borrow from self-psychology and the types of transferences Kohut outlined in his understanding of narcissistic transferences (a normal sphere of developmental influence for teens struggling with forging a sense of identity and belonging). The kind of usage I am talking about here is akin to the colloquial way we might talk about someone “getting used” in a relationship, wherein the other is explored as a means to an end, but also could imply a relationship based more on idealization, identification, a need for empathic mirroring and attunement, etc. It is the apparent relational consequence of someone who is struggling to embrace a turn to authenticity, and the kind of vulnerability and commitment to self and others demanded of such a position.
Mature relatedness would then be some kind of aspirational developmental end point to all of this. Think something like Fairbairn’s mature interdependence. It’s a kind of phase where we can come into possession of our various historical object modes of relating, take on a position of resoluteness, and both endure and embrace the relational anxieties and angst that come from attempting to open into authentic relationality with another. Note that, much like in the way Heidegger talks about authenticity in Being and Time, I think this is likely a rare position to be able to take up, even in the most well-developed and mature relationships. We will almost always inevitably fall back into immaturity, and its various qualities of demandingness, guardedness, manipulation, overdependence, and whatever other unseemly things we are all culpable of bringing into our relationships. It is not so much a question of being able to perpetually hold these interpersonal proclivities at bay, but how to notice them as they are happening or have happened, and finding the resolve to recognize your responsibility in those dynamics.
Before concluding, I also want to suggest, briefly, that therapists can be just as susceptible to these “modes of usage and relatedness” in the work that they do as anyone else might be in the way they maintain and engage in relationships in their day-to-day life. Though we don’t always talk about it this way, the trappings of countertransference are real, and the desire of the therapist to love and be loved by their clients in a way that signals something more like usage than relatedness (i.e. the therapist wanting to be seen as influential, effective, “good”) is a real danger in doing therapy that must always be forefront of the therapist’s mind if they want to be able to do the work of therapy in the way that it demands.
I am often overwhelmed by the degree to which it is important for us to be able to love and feel loved in the everyday goings on of our lives. Many come to therapy because they have either been deprived of these feelings in some important way or are somehow struggling in their capacity to be attentive to and feel their way into it. When done well, therapy can serve as a space where clients have the opportunity to either experience or reexperience that sensation in a new and meaningful way. The well attuned therapist can hold space for ways in which lovingness has come, for the client, to feel dulled, overwhelming, unearned, insufficient, or whatever other states work to consume a recipient who has time and again been made to be convinced of their own unworthiness or unlovability. We enter with them into the grief and sadness of what that means, and show them that even those positions, in and of themselves, are as much worthy of love as any other parts of who they are. We create the safety and freedom for them to move into deeper modes of relatedness and curiosity about their own subjectivity and how it might intermingle and become interwoven with the subjectivities of others. And we do so by moving into those spaces ourselves and demonstrating what it might be like to hold conflict, appeal to the more tender parts of who we are, or honor our right to be and become based on no other criteria than the fact that we are already here to begin with, and so we must. We let them use us, so that they might find some value in what it might mean to relate to us. Which, perhaps said more experientially, we let them recreate the loving experience they have already had, so that they can find their way to the loving experience they crave, by finding ourselves in our own ability to be with them in the insufficiency of the one, while embodying and sharing with them the possibility of the awe, the wonder, and the richness of the other.
