ABSTRACT

Clinicians and researchers alike are recognizing the crucial role of disturbed object relations in the development and expression of all types of psychopathology, including the personality disorders. This recognition, coupled with an appreciation of the distinction between internalized object relations and relations between the self and the object in the external world, has led Rorschach investigators (Blatt, 1990; Lerner, 1998; Mayman, 1967) to focus on the concept internal object relations, or on what Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962) have denoted the “representational world.”