Object Relation: The emotional bond between oneself and another.

Psychodynamic:  A psychology that holds that mood and behavior are influenced by energies that are within the mind, or psyche.

Object Relations is one of the psychodynamic approaches to understanding how human beings develop psychologically, and how we behave and experience mood.

Object Relations, which grew out of classical psychoanalytic theory, was developed in the 1950s by several British psychoanalysts who began to think that the need for relationship governs how a person gets  "put together" mentally, and also is the power that drives all of one's life.

Freud originally used the term "object" to mean anything that an infant craves or attaches to in order to fulfill any of its needs. Object Relations envisioned a specifically personal  "object," who is craved and attached to because of a very particular need - the need to be
related to someone else.

Object Relations theory places relationship at the very heart of what it means to be human. It believes that humans retain a built-in drive to form and maintain relationship, which is the first and fundamental human need. This need and the drive to fulfill it provide the context and meaning for every other need and desire.

Object Relations suggests that the people we attach to in early life--and the character or quality of those attachments--become the building blocks of our personality. Further, our early experiences function as a kind of blueprint for how we establish and maintain relationships in the future.

Many Object Relations theorists see psychological dysfunction as an expression of being stuck at a stage of development, unable to mature further because at that point one's primary relationship fails to meet some critical need. Thus, dysfunctional and symptomatic behaviors are seen as attempts to meet immature needs.

The methods and goals of Object RelationsTherapy derive from this concept that whatever is painful or dysfunctional in one's life can be traced to and repaired by one's patterns of being in relationship to others.  A problem in living arises, however, when one expects mature relationships to meet the needs of the child one used to be.

The therapeutic relationship aims to function as a kind of reparative surrogate for the early "object relation,"  providing a psychological environment for the person to get early  needs met.  This allows the Self to grow up, and to grow strong for healthy relationships in the future.