| Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools. |
Medication as Object300 Central Park West New York, NY 10024, atutter{at}mac.com People experience and treat medication as though it were a person: in other words, as an object. Among the many symbolic meanings attributed to medication, this sort of personification, or object representation, is a meaning that medication is uniquely positioned to contain and convey: imbued with intentionality and influence, medication moves beyond the sphere of static, iconic representation and enters the changeable, dynamic object world of action, aim, and agency. Unlike more generic or stereotypic meanings, object representations attributed to medication may reflect the patient's specific dynamics and object relations. These representations are many and mutable, and take on shifting and overlapping forms that evolve with the analytic process. Medication may represent a third person within the framework of an analytic treatment, expanding the analytic dyad into a triad and offering new transference paradigms to explore. The defensive displacement of transferential qualities and attitudes, or split-off parts thereof, from the analyst onto medication can serve as a powerful resistance to the awareness of the transference to the analyst. Clinical examples illustrate the utility and importance of the analysis of medication as object, for both patient and analyst, with particular attention to the transference.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 54, No. 3,
781-804 (2006) This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
 |
|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
