Concept
Object relations theory
A family of psychoanalytic theories that take a person's relations with others, and with the inner images of others laid down in early life, rather than the discharge of drives, as the basic stuff of mental life and development. Its main British forms grew from the work of Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Balint between the 1930s and the 1950s, and Fairbairn gave it its most thoroughgoing form by holding that libido seeks objects from the start.
Development
1976
developed by Otto F. Kernberg
Kernberg built an object-relations theory within ego psychology, in which units of self-image, object-image and the affect linking them are the building blocks of psychic structure, drawing together Kleinian, British Middle Group and ego-psychological models.
In Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (1976)
Undated
developed by Ronald Fairbairn
Fairbairn recast psychoanalysis as a theory of object relations throughout, holding that libido seeks objects rather than pleasure; the US edition of his collected papers bore the title An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality.
In Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships (1944);Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952)
Relations
- 1976 developed by Otto F. Kernberg
Kernberg built an object-relations theory within ego psychology, in which units of self-image, object-image and the affect linking them are the building blocks of psychic structure, drawing together Kleinian, British Middle Group and ego-psychological models.
- developed by Ronald Fairbairn
Fairbairn recast psychoanalysis as a theory of object relations throughout, holding that libido seeks objects rather than pleasure; the US edition of his collected papers bore the title An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality.
- gave rise to Attachment theory
Attachment theory grew from the British object-relations tradition's focus on early relationships and loss, though Bowlby replaced its reliance on phantasy and drive with ethological and observational evidence.
- gave rise to Relational psychoanalysis
The second root of the relational school is British object relations theory, above all Fairbairn and Winnicott. From it the school took its concern with internal objects and with relations as the stuff of mind.
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'.
- 1952
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality is W. R. D. Fairbairn's only book. It gathers papers written in Edinburgh between 1927 and 1951, and its core, a series of papers from 1940 to 1946, sets out a systematic revision of Freud's theory in which the personality is understood through its relationships with objects rather than through the vicissitudes of instinctual impulses. Fairbairn's starting point is that libido is primarily object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking: the erotogenic zones are channels through which the person reaches for objects, and pleasure is a signpost to the object rather than the aim. On this basis he replaces Abraham's scheme of libidinal phases with a development from infantile dependence, grounded in primary identification with the mother, through a transitional stage to mature dependence, in which a differentiated person relates to others recognised as separate. Fairbairn holds that the schizoid position, in which the infant comes to feel that its own love is destructive, is more fundamental than the depressive position, where the danger lies in hate, and that it underlies all later psychopathology. Unable to bear dependence on parents who frustrate it, the child takes their bad aspects into itself so that the outer world can remain good, a step he calls the moral defence; repression is directed first at these internalized bad objects. The obsessional, paranoid, hysterical and phobic states are four techniques of the transitional stage for managing accepted and rejected internal objects. In the 1944 paper on endopsychic structure he replaces id, ego and superego with a model of a split ego: a central ego related to an ideal object, a libidinal ego bound to an exciting object, and an internal saboteur, later called the antilibidinal ego, bound to a rejecting object, the whole held in place by the central ego's repression and the saboteur's attacks on the libidinal ego. The later papers argue that energy cannot be separated from structure, that aggression is a reaction to frustration rather than an independent drive, and that treatment aims to release bad objects from the unconscious and to lessen the splitting of the ego through the relationship with the analyst. Earlier clinical papers and occasional pieces on social and wartime questions complete the volume. Published in the United States as An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality, it became one of the founding texts of the British object-relations school.
- 1976
Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis
Kernberg's second book sets out the theory that underlies his clinical work with borderline patients. Gathering papers from 1966 to 1975 with some new material, it offers what he calls a formulation of psychoanalytic object-relations theory within ego psychology. The starting point is clinical: borderline patients alternate between contradictory states of mind, each fully conscious and each held apart from the other, which neither repression, isolation nor denial explains. Kernberg reads this as splitting, and he builds a model of the mind in which the basic units are internalized object relations: a self-representation and an object-representation joined by an affect. Through introjection, identification and ego identity, these units form the ego, the superego and the id. The theoretical half traces how these units develop. It moves from an undifferentiated early stage, through a stage in which self and object images are still fused, to their differentiation and then to the integration of good and bad images into whole representations of the self and of others, ending in the consolidation of ego and superego. Psychosis, borderline pathology and neurosis are placed at successive points on this line. A chapter on instincts and affects argues that affects are the primary building blocks of motivation, and that libido and aggression are organized out of them over development. A historical chapter places the model among the object-relations theories of Klein, Fairbairn, Jacobson and Mahler, among others. The second half applies the model. Kernberg proposes a classification of character pathology on three levels, higher, intermediate and lower, according to the integration of the superego, whether the defences rest on repression or on splitting, and the quality of object relations and identity. The borderline conditions fall at the lowest level. He updates his approach to the transference and countertransference of borderline patients. In two chapters on love, he treats the capacity to fall in love and to stay in love as a developmental achievement that joins sexual desire with tenderness and with relations to a whole, real person, and he traces how narcissistic and borderline pathology limit it, including in adolescence and middle age. A final chapter extends the theory to small groups and hospital administration, sketching a psychiatric hospital in which treatment, group processes and a functional administration together make up a therapeutic community.
- 1983
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell's book, published by Harvard University Press in 1983, compares the major psychoanalytic theories according to one question: where each places a person's relations with others. The authors distinguish two basic models. In the drive/structure model, which descends from Freud, relations with others are generated and shaped by the need to gratify drives. In the relational/structure model, relations are primary and cannot be reduced to anything more basic. The book reads Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis and the British object relations theories of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip as radical alternatives to drive theory. It reads the ego psychology of Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson and Kernberg as a strategy of accommodation, which widens drive theory to take object relations in. Kohut and Sandler are treated as mixed-model strategies that combine elements of both. A final chapter follows the divergence between the two models into debates on diagnosis and clinical technique.
See also
People
References
- Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships1944Evidence for a relation
- Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality1952Evidence for a relation
- Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis1976Evidence for a relation
- Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory1983Evidence for a relation