Part Object

this fundamentally partial aspect of the object in so far as it is pivot, centre, key of human desire... directed towards a dialectic of totalisation, namely the only one worthy of us, the flat object, the round object, the total object

Lacan argues that analytic culture has systematically effaced its own discovery of the partial object as the structural pivot of desire, replacing it with a normalizing ideology of genital totality.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

this partiality of the object has the closest possible relationship with what I have called the function of metonymy... this part taken for the whole in the operation is transformed: it becomes its signifier

Lacan links the structural partiality of the object to metonymy, arguing that the part object functions not as a fragment of reality but as a signifier — the linguistic operator of desire.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

the objects of partial love... love ready to accede to this normal object of the genital relationship, the other, that of the other sex... minus the genitals. That is what is meant by 'the objects of partial love'

Lacan explicates Abraham's concept of partial love objects — love of the other that is complete except for the genital zone — identifying the phallus as the privileged exemplary object of this structure.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

a stage of object-love with the exclusion of the genitals... the individual cannot love his object completely because of the presence of its genitals

Abraham formalizes a developmental stage in which libidinal object-love excludes the genital zone, linking this structure to hysteria, impotence, and frigidity via the castration complex.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

in paranoia the patient represents his persecutor by a part of his body, and believes that he is carrying it within himself. He would like to get rid of that foreign body but cannot

Abraham traces the persecutor in paranoia to a fantasied body-part object — the internalized feces identified with the penis — establishing an early clinical basis for the part-object concept in psychopathology.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

increases the need to split the ego and object excessively, which can lead to a state of fragmentation... unable to internalize his primal object (the mother) sufficiently as a good object

Klein maps the failure to move beyond part-object relating — excessive splitting of ego and object — as the structural deficit underlying schizophrenic fragmentation and the absence of a stable internal good object.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

from birth onwards, however, in an ego lacking in strength and subjected to violent splitting processes the internalization of the good object differs in nature and strength from that of the manic-depressive

Klein differentiates the quality of object internalization in paranoid-schizoid versus depressive conditions, underscoring how the degree of splitting governs the fate of part-object relations across diagnostic categories.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

there is too much said about qualities like roundness, completeness, and wholeness. It is high time that we spoke of deficiency, the invalidism of Self

Samuels reports Guggenbuhl-Craig's challenge to the Jungian ideal of wholeness, a critique structurally parallel to Lacan's critique of the 'total object,' though routed through analytical psychology's discourse on the Self rather than through part-object theory proper.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →