Medication as object

People experience and treat medication as though it were a person: in other words, as an object. Among the many symbolic meanings attrib-uted to medication, this sort of personification, or object representation, is a meaning that medication is uniquely positioned to contain and convey: imbued with intentionality and influence, medication moves beyond the sphere of static, iconic representation and enters the changeable, dynamic object world of action, aim, and agency. Unlike more generic or stereo-typic meanings, object representations attributed to medication may reflect the patient’s specific dynamics and object relations. These repre-sentations are many and mutable, and take on shifting and overlapping forms that evolve with the analytic process. Medication may represent a third person within the framework of an analytic treatment, expanding the analytic dyad into a triad and offering new transference para-digms to explore. The defensive displacement of transferential qualities and attitudes, or split-off parts thereof, from the analyst onto medicatio