What’s a good object to do?

Relational psychoanalysts consider a major locus of therapeutic change to exist in the relationship between a patient and a therapist. The analyst provides a creative form of a real, not ideal, good object, whose interactions with the patient present the patient with an opportunity to experience new forms of interaction with a new object. The shift to a relational mode, then, necessitates the illumination of the clinical uses of an analyst as good object. The author proposes and describes three categories of the analyst functioning as good object in the clinical setting: (1) Dynamic identification, a clinical application derived from Fairbairn’s keystone concept of dynamic structure; (2) The acceptance of patients’ love, a requisite of treatment that follows Fairbairn’s redefinition of libido from a humanistic level of discourse; and (3) Empathic attunement to psychic organization, a subcategory of empathy which considers empathy toward deep organizational states rather than its more usual reference to affective resonance. Clinical vignettes are used to illustrate the author’s proposals.