Edna O'Shaughnessy
Edna O'Shaughnessy was a South African-born British Kleinian psychoanalyst.
Training
O'Shaughnessy trained in philosophy, which she taught at Oxford, before re-training as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. She subsequently became an analyst and training analyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society.Theoretical contributions
Part of an influential group of post-Kleinian psychoanalysts working and writing in the 1970s and 80s, O'Shaughnessy's work builds on the theories of Melanie Klein and her successors such as W.R. Bion.In a series of influential papers, O'Shaughnessy developed the concept of the defensive organization, a rigid patterns of defences and object relations that prevents progress from being made. In ‘A clinical study of a defensive organization’ she charts a patient's emergence from such a narcissistic structure, and in ‘Enclaves and Excursions’ she examines how such defensive organisations can become established in the transference-countertransference, leading to a treatment becoming 'stuck'. In this respect, O'Shaughnessy's work reflects the growing interest of Kleinian psychoanalysts in the concept of enactment. Her concepts have been developed by John Steiner in his understanding of 'psychic retreats' and 'pathological organisations'.
O'Shaughnessy explored the role of projections in the psychotic, noting how they can be "loaded with enormous hostility; they are weapons - boomerangs which destroy the foundations for intuitive knowledge of the self and object".
In the tradition of W. R. Bion, she emphasized the importance of thinking in forming object relations, noting how failure to integrate observation and experience can prevent the formation of, and working through of the Oedipal triangle.