How the Psychoanalytic Use of Object Constancy and Internalization Can Inform Our Understanding of the Teacher/Student Relationship
Authors:   University of Texas at Austin, Danze Elizabeth 
Published: January 2024

In looking at the discipline of Psychoanalysis, we might better understand concepts around basic human development such as object constancy and internalization as ways of informing how the mentoring or teaching relationship is focused on the growth and development in the other person— our student. Object constancy and internalization enable an individual to preserve a stable, subjective representation of an object (the psychotherapist, for instance) in the face of complex or contradictory affects. This paper looks at this through the lens of the psychoanalytic dyad— the relationship between psychoanalyst and analysand (patient)— as a vehicle for envisioning how we might better educate our students, especially in the intensive, hours-long design studio. In Hans Loewald’s important paper, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” he expounds on the parent-child relationship and how the empathic parent holds a vision of the future child and in various ways mediates this vision to the child. The child, in identification with it, can then grow. By internalizing aspects of the parent, the child also internalizes the parent’s image of the child. While a teacher is not participating in the role of parent or psychoanalyst, a primary concern for an analyst, parent, or teacher is the aiding in the growth and development of another. The idea that the parent/analyst/teacher’s capacity to imagine future growth, anticipate something for the child or patient or student, hold that in mind for them, and offer that vision is a reflective way of expanding possibilities and potentialities for them. Perhaps in this way, the successful, authentic, and autonomous student begins in the mind of the teacher. We understand that the psychoanalyst seeks to understand and “take in” the analysand, to help organize thought processes and mindset. Then, working alongside the analysand, the teacher helps to organize the student’s design approach and process. The teacher then “hands back” organizational and other insight through interpretation to the student, who must bring meaning and understanding to the changing project— and to themselves, the developing designer. In addition to object constancy and internalization, by looking at the writings and clinical work of Winnicott, Ogden, Kohut, and others, we will explore related notions of receptivity, projective identification, concordant transference, and co-construction and ask how they might be understood within the teacher/ student paradigm in this context. Lastly, in an analysis, realizations and understandings continue to occur and develop long past the end of treatment. It is a fluid and ongoing process, with multiple mechanisms extending beyond the limits of the analysis. The successful design student may internalize the relationship with her instructor, aiding the student in positive self-constancy long after the design studio is over and the instructor is gone. By understanding how to employ some of these ideas, we might better appreciate our role as teachers in aiding our students in a life-long quest for growth and mastery.