Article
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.
Main ideas
- What is repressed is in the first place bad internalised objects, not impulses or unpleasant memories. Impulses are repressed because they are directed towards bad objects, and memories because the people in them are identified with bad objects.
- Abused and neglected children are unwilling to admit that their parents are bad. Because the child needs its parents, it internalises their badness in order to control it, so that its outer world is made safer at the price of an inner world peopled by persecutors.
- In the moral defence the child turns the unconditional badness of its objects into a conditional, moral badness of its own: it becomes the bad one so that its parents can be good, and because its badness is moral it can, in principle, be made good by good conduct. Fairbairn frames this as preferring to be a sinner in a world ruled by God to living in a world ruled by the Devil.
- The superego, built from internalised good objects, is the agent of the moral defence, and guilt is a defence against the more primitive terror of bad objects. Guilt, and interpretation in terms of guilt, can therefore act as a resistance that screens the deeper situation.
- People remain libidinally attached to their bad objects because they need them. The deepest source of resistance in analysis is the fear of releasing bad objects from the unconscious, reinforced by the patient's loyalty to them.
- The return of the repressed is the return of bad objects, experienced much as earlier ages experienced possession by demons; in this sense the psychotherapist is the heir of the exorcist.
- Treatment has to bring about the release of bad objects within the transference, once the analyst has become a sufficiently good object for the patient to risk it, so that the libidinal cathexis of the bad objects can be dissolved.
- The war neuroses rest on infantile dependence. Their characteristic feature is separation anxiety, aroused when military service cuts the soldier off from the objects he depends on, and the strain and dangers of war precipitate the breakdown by reactivating the internal situation and releasing long-repressed bad objects.
What it shows
- 1943
Ronald Fairbairn introduced Moral defence
Introduced in the 1943 paper on bad objects and the war neuroses.
Ronald Fairbairn reworked Repression
Fairbairn held that what is repressed is first of all bad internalised objects, and later the parts of the ego bound to them, rather than impulses or memories.