ABSTRACT
Because our connection with the good object is the original setting in which we experience the aliveness of the self, when the end of work is to have that experience, work is linked to the connection with the good object. This is not because the relationship with the good object creates in us the capacity to feel alive, but because that relationship secures for us the sense that our vitality has a place in the inter-psychic world, that its expression will be af®rmed rather than rejected there. The af®rmation of vitality in the interpsychic world, then, is the ®rst step toward the kind of work that realizes the presence of the self.
