The use of the partner: object-usage, mutual recognition, and the mixed-neurotype couple

Winnicott’s distinction between object-relating and object-usage offers couples psychotherapy a framework for understanding what genuine intimacy requires. To ‘use’ the partner is not to exploit her but to perceive her as real, a subject with her own opacity and capacity to surprise. The transition requires what Winnicott called destruction: the intrapsychic testing of the partner’s externality. If the partner survives, neither retaliating nor collapsing, she is discovered as genuinely other. This article traces the destruction–survival–reality sequence from the infant–mother dyad to adult partnership, drawing on Benjamin’s account of mutual recognition, the Kleinian understanding of projective identification as the mechanism by which object-relating is rigidly maintained, and Fonagy’s mentalisation framework. It proposes that mentalisation is better understood as a family of capacities (some implicit and affectively grounded, some explicit and rule-based), all of which can achieve the recognition of otherness that object-usage requires. A composite clinical vignette of a mixed-neurotype couple illustrates the possibility of building a ‘translation practice’: a deliberate, bidirectional effort to render legible across cognitive styles what implicit mentalisation renders legible within one. The capacity to ‘use’ the partner is constrained by material and developmental conditions; Winnicott’s scandalous term is best understood not as exploitation but as reception.