The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects (with Special Reference to the 'War Neuroses')

Published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1943 and collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952), this paper moves the theory of repression onto the ground of object relations. Drawing on his earlier work with delinquent and abused children and on his wartime work with soldiers suffering from war neuroses, Ronald Fairbairn argues that what is repressed is in the first place not impulses or painful memories but bad objects that have been internalised; impulses and memories are repressed because they are bound up with such objects. A child who depends on parents who neglect or mistreat it cannot afford to see them as bad, so it takes their badness into itself, gaining security in the outer world at the cost of persecution within. This leads to the moral defence: the child converts the unconditional badness of its objects into a conditional, moral badness of its own, becoming the guilty one so that its parents can remain good, with the superego, formed from internalised good objects, as the agent of this defence. Guilt is thus a defence against the far more dreaded situation of being in the power of bad objects, and the deepest resistance in analysis is the fear of their release, sustained by the patient's libidinal attachment to them. Fairbairn treats the return of the repressed as the return of bad objects, likens the psychotherapist to a successor of the exorcist, and holds that treatment must bring about their release in the transference, once the analyst has become a sufficiently good object for their hold to be dissolved. He reads the war neuroses in the same terms: the soldiers who broke down were marked by infantile dependence, their central symptom was separation anxiety, and the dangers of war precipitated the neurosis by releasing bad objects repressed long before.