On the object relational texture of affects

Marty Mayman will be remembered as a uniquely gifted clinician, diagnostici an, supervisor, and teacher. In this article, I link his distinctive capaci ty for empathic understanding to his reliance on self-representational and object representational concepts as a vehicle for accessing the inner life of his participant. Mayman's special brand of empathy was remarkable for it s sensitivity to nuance as well as its ability to strike a chord with vivid resonance. His understanding of ego development included the notion that s elf-representation and object representation make up part of the internaliz ed structure of all ego functions. Self- and object representations can be thought of as embedded in the individual's subjective experience of the ver y performing of those ego functions. Self- and object representations can a lso be thought of as embedded in the individual's attitudes toward the exer cising of particular ego functions, for example, where the individual strug gles with whether or nor he or she feels a sense of permission to "own" or exercise specific ego capacities. In this article, I apply the use of self- and object representation as a way of "texturizing" the ego to the way obj ect relations are embedded within affects. I use some Early Memory Test(May man, 1968) material to elucidate the role of object relational themes in th e specific way in which affects are experienced.