ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the development of an interpersonal transitional space in which corrective emotional experiences can take place the therapist becoming an object to the patient thereby offering the patient a relationship working model that was missing or lost in childhood. In particular, the therapy can offer a new interpersonal space, from which the patient can develop a new or an enhanced Ego position. The chapter suggests that object relations theory offers some valuable insights which can be integrated into experiential dynamic therapies concepts, without devaluing any of the available techniques. J. Bowlby’s work extensively demonstrated the importance of attachment bonds between parents and infants. He focused not so much on the child’s functional needs, on a set of metapsychological assumptions about unconscious destructive and other phantasies in the child, as did M. Klein, but rather on the empirical observation of attachment patterns.
