Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships

Main ideas

• Libido is primarily object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking. The internalization of objects, and their persistence in inner reality, already imply this, and Freud himself wrote that love seeks objects. Seen this way, clinging to painful experience can be explained by ties to bad objects, without a repetition compulsion or a primary death instinct.
• Impulses cannot be considered apart from the ego structures they energize and the object relations they serve. Analysis conducted in terms of impulses alone is sterile, especially with schizoid patients. The central ego describes the drama of inner reality from the dress circle, takes no part in it, and enjoys being the analyst's fellow observer. The analyst's self-effacement, combined with impulse interpretations, strains a capacity for relationship that is already damaged.
• The id merges into the ego, which carries impulse-tension from the start. Impulses are directed at reality from birth: the infant's first oral behaviour is already aimed at the breast. The pleasure principle becomes a subsidiary principle that operates when the reality principle fails. Repression is aimed at bad internalized objects and at the parts of the ego that seek them, so one part of the ego represses another. The difficulty of sublimation, multiple personality and hysterical dissociation all point to a multiplicity of egos.
• Freud's structural theory, built on melancholia, and Klein's depressive position do not fit most analytic patients, in whom the central position is schizoid. The characteristic schizoid affect is a sense of futility, often mistaken for depression. Hysterical dissociation is itself a split of the ego, which is why Fairbairn calls for a return to hysteria. Guilt arises from the 'moral defence': the child would rather be morally bad than have unconditionally bad parents. The super-ego, which rests on that defence, belongs to a later level, above an older level of amoral internal persecutors.
• A patient's dream serves as the paradigm. An actress, standing for both the dreamer and her artificial, 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. Dreams are not wish-fulfilments but 'shorts' of situations in inner reality, and their figures are parts of the ego or internalized objects. Here they form three pairs: the observing ego with the husband, the attacking ego with the mother, and the attacked ego with the father.
• The basic endopsychic situation: a central ego, at once conscious, preconscious and unconscious, uses aggression to reject and repress two unconscious subsidiary egos. These are the libidinal ego, attached to the needed object, and the internal saboteur, attached to the rejecting object. The internal saboteur attacks the libidinal ego, and above all its object. The central ego corresponds to Freud's ego but is primary and dynamic. The libidinal ego corresponds to the id but is derived from the central ego. The internal saboteur is an amoral ego structure that produces anxiety, not guilt; the super-ego corresponds rather to the saboteur together with its object. The super-ego is kept as the source of guilt, while the id is dropped.
• Six conclusions follow. The ego is split. Hysteria rests on a schizoid position. The split is driven by the central ego's aggression. The internal saboteur is repressed just as the libidinal ego is. The dynamic of repression is aggression. Finally, splitting of the ego (Bleuler's concept, coined for schizophrenia) and repression (Freud's concept, coined for hysteria) are the same process seen from two sides.
• The origin of the situation: in a state of nature the infant would rarely be frustrated, and aggression, though primary, is subordinate to libido and does not arise without frustration. Frustration by the mother makes her an ambivalent object. The infant splits her into a good and a bad object and internalizes the bad, unsatisfying one in order to control it, since internalization is a form of coercion. The bad object both frustrates and allures, so inside it is still intolerable. The infant then splits it into a needed object and a rejecting object and represses both. The 'pseudopodia' of the ego that remain attached to them are split off and repressed along with them.
• Expressing hate to a rejecting mother risks losing the good object; this is the root of depression. Expressing love into an emotional vacuum brings shame, humiliation and worthlessness, and at a deeper level a sense of exploding, of being emptied of libido, of psychical death; this is the root of futility and of schizoid states. The child therefore uses a maximum of aggression to subdue a maximum of libidinal need ('divide et impera'). The excess aggression passes to the internal saboteur, and the excess libido to the libidinal ego. The saboteur's attack on the needed object continues the child's resentment of the mother as a temptress, and its attack on the libidinal ego continues the child's hatred of its own dependence.
• Repression is both direct, by the central ego, and indirect, through the internal saboteur's attacks; Freud described the indirect kind as the super-ego's hostility to the id. The libidinal ego's obstinate attachment to its repressed object is itself a powerful resistance, contrary to Freud's claim that the repressed offers none, and it plays a part in the negative therapeutic reaction. Beneath all this the original ambivalence persists: people are reluctant to give up either their first need or their first hate. Because impulse and structure are one, the repression of aggression also becomes intelligible, as one ego structure repressing another.
• The Oedipus situation is an end-product, not an ultimate cause; that role belongs to infantile dependence on the mother. The father first appears as a parent without breasts, so the relationship with him is mainly emotional. Physical need for the parents' genitals grows as emotional satisfaction fails. Internal objects become composites, built by layering and fusion, and their make-up shapes psychosexual attitude and the perversions. The child turns two ambivalent parents into one needed and one rejecting parent, so the Oedipus situation is an internal situation, and at bottom both objects remain figures of the mother. In Hamlet the Queen is the real villain.
• Neurotic anxiety is libido changed in quality by the saboteur's attack, as in Freud's first theory, and above a further threshold libidinal discharge is experienced as hysterical suffering. The two basic differences from Freud are directional, object-seeking libido and the unity of energy and structure; Fairbairn traces Freud's separation of the two to Helmholtzian physics. His model of five structures and two energies offers a wider explanatory range and treats symptoms as expressions of the whole personality. Therapy aims to narrow the split and to reduce the attachments and aggression within it. Each clinical state has its own pattern. The basic one is hysterical, which makes the infant's screaming fits the earliest symptoms, though the underlying process is schizoid. Internal objects too must be granted some dynamic activity of their own.

What it shows

Cited in

• Repression
• Splitting

External links

In English

• Routledge(opens the store’s page in a new tab) Print Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, 1994