Working with Fairbairn’s Metaphors of the Human Mind
in Mental Health Treatment Setting

with Dr. David P. Celani

• Location: Virtual

• Source/ Event Link: Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
  

“Different psychoanalytic models express their philosophies of humankind and its development in metaphors. This interactive seminar will introduce the attendees to Fairbairn’s metaphor of the human psyche. Fairbairn’s model belongs to a group of relational models that see the child’s early experiences with his mother/caregiver as critical to his development and wellbeing. Fairbairn saw structuralization of the psyche as a consequence of real interactions with external objects that are either growth enhancing, or frustrating of the child’s normal and legitimate needs."

By the end of this educational activity, its participants will be able to:

• Discuss how different psychoanalytic models express their philosophies of humankind in metaphors.

• Analyze the dynamics of Fairbairn’s model with its multiple ego states which move in and out of awareness.

• Utilize this awareness to see patient shifts in ego states as evidence of multiple, split-off, selves, each of which contains a view of reality unknown to the other ego structures, as well as to the central ego.

• Examine the patient’s history with a focus on traumatic early events that have been minimized, ignored, excused or dissociated and which would have destroyed the dependency bond to the parent if the event was understood.

• Analyze Fairbairn’s model of defensiveness that emerges from patients in the clinical setting and learn how to defeat these repeated patterns of denial.

• Discuss and analyze how repetition compulsion emerges directly for the self and object components that have been dissociated and held in the unconscious.”