Concept
Central ego
In Fairbairn's model, the conscious, everyday part of the ego that remains after the libidinal ego and the internal saboteur have been split off. It relates to real people and to an idealised internal object stripped of its exciting and rejecting sides, and it keeps the two split-off egos, with the objects they are bound to, under repression.
Development
1944
introduced by Ronald Fairbairn
In Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships (1944)
Relations
Works
- 1944
Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships
Fairbairn's main structural paper, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (vol. 25, 1944, pp. 70–93), turns two of his earlier claims into a new model of the mind. The first claim, from 1941, is that libido seeks objects rather than pleasure. The second, from 1943, is that repression is aimed at internalized bad objects. He begins with the limits of 'impulse psychology'. Impulses, he argues, are only the dynamic side of ego structures and cannot be considered apart from them or from the object relations they serve. When interpretation deals in impulses alone, schizoid patients can produce rich fantasy material without end while the central ego merely watches the drama of inner reality from the dress circle. The id therefore merges into an ego that is a source of energy from the start and is oriented to reality from birth. The pleasure principle becomes a secondary principle that takes over when relations with objects fail. Since one part of the ego can repress another, repression implies a multiplicity of egos. Fairbairn holds that Freud's structural theory, and Klein's depressive position, were built on melancholia. Against them he puts the schizoid position at the centre and calls for a return to hysteria, whose dissociations he reads as splits of the ego. Guilt and the super-ego he places at a later level, established by the 'moral defence', above a deeper level of amoral bad objects. The model comes from a patient's dream. In it an actress, standing for both the dreamer and her rejecting mother, attacks a figure of the dreamer that turns into a man linked to her husband and her father, while the husband looks on helplessly. Fairbairn reads dreams as 'shorts' of situations in inner reality rather than as wish-fulfilments, and he finds in this one the basic endopsychic situation. A central ego, partly conscious, rejects and represses two subsidiary egos with aggression: a libidinal ego bound to a 'needed object', and an 'internal saboteur' bound to a 'rejecting object'. The internal saboteur, in turn, attacks the libidinal ego and its object. The central ego roughly corresponds to Freud's ego, but it is primary and dynamic. The libidinal ego corresponds to the id, but it is a structure derived from the central ego. The internal saboteur is an amoral ego structure that produces anxiety rather than guilt; the super-ego corresponds rather to the saboteur together with its object. The situation arises in infancy out of frustration by the mother. The infant splits her into good and bad, internalizes the unsatisfying object in order to control it, splits that object into a tempting side and a rejecting side, and represses both. The parts of the ego still attached to each are split off with them. Expressing hatred risks losing the good object, and expressing love to a rejecting mother risks humiliation, emptiness and loss of the self. So the child turns a maximum of aggression against a maximum of libidinal need, a technique Fairbairn calls 'divide et impera'. From this he draws several revisions. Splitting of the ego and repression are one process, and its dynamic is aggression. The attack of the internal saboteur is an 'indirect repression', the part of the process that Freud described. The libidinal ego's attachment to its repressed object is a resistance in its own right, which helps explain the negative therapeutic reaction. The Oedipus situation is an internal end-product, not an ultimate cause: the child simplifies two ambivalent parents into one needed parent and one rejecting parent, and both internal objects are at bottom figures of the mother. Neurotic anxiety and hysterical suffering are libido that the internal saboteur's attack has changed in quality. Fairbairn traces Freud's separation of energy from structure to Helmholtzian physics, and offers instead a psychology of dynamic structure: five structures and two forms of energy, libido and aggression. In this psychology, therapy aims to narrow the split and to reduce the attachments and the aggression within it. Every clinical state has its own endopsychic pattern, and the basic pattern is hysterical, though the process that produces it is schizoid. At the end he grants internal objects some dynamism of their own. In later versions of the theory the needed object is called the 'exciting object', and Fairbairn later renamed the internal saboteur the 'antilibidinal ego'.
See also
People
References
- Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships1944Evidence for a relation