2010 Why Read Fairbairn?
2010 Why Read Fairbairn?
Thomas H. Ogden
306 Laurel Street, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA – [email protected]
The author offers a close reading of portions of Fairbairn’s work in which he not
only explicates and clarifies Fairbairn’s thinking, but generates ideas of his own
by developing concepts that he believes to be implicit in, or logical extensions of,
Fairbairn’s work. Among the unstated or underdeveloped aspects of Fairbairn’s
contribution that the author discusses are (1) the idea that the formation of the
internal object world is always, in part, a response to trauma (actual failure on
the part of the mother to convey to her infant a sense that she loves him and
accepts his love); (2) the notion that the infant’s unceasing efforts to transform
the internalized relationship with the unloving mother into a loving relationship –
thus reversing the effect on his mother of his (imagined) ‘toxic love’ – is the single
most important motivation sustaining the structure of the internal object world;
and (3) the idea that attacks on oneself for the way one loves, while self-destruc-
tive, contain a glimmer of insight into one’s own self-hatred and shame regarding
one’s endless, futile attempts to change oneself (or the rejecting object) into a dif-
ferent person. The author, using his own clinical work, illustrates the way he
makes use of his understanding of the ‘emotional life’ of internal objects to facili-
tate the patient’s emotional growth.
I have found that Fairbairn develops a model of the mind that incorporates
into its very structure a conceptualization of early psychic development
that is not found in the writing of any other major 20th century analytic
theorist.1 Fairbairn replaces Freud’s (1923) structural model ⁄ metaphor of
the mind with a model ⁄ metaphor in which the mind is conceived of as an
‘‘inner world’’ (Fairbairn, 1943, p. 67) in which split-off and repressed
parts of the self enter into stable, yet potentially alterable, object relation-
ships with one another. The ‘cast of characters’ (i.e. sub-organizations of
the personality) constituting Fairbairn’s internal object world is larger than
the triumvirate of Freud’s structural model and provides what I find to be
a richer set of metaphors with which to understand (1) certain types of
human dilemmas, particularly those based on the fear that one’s love is
destructive; and (2) the central role played by feelings of resentment, con-
tempt, disillusionment and addictive ‘love’ in structuring the unconscious
mind.
1
This discussion of papers by Fairbairn is the sixth in a series of articles in which I offer studies of
seminal analytic contributions. I have previously discussed works by Freud, Winnicott, Bion, Loewald
and Searles (Ogden, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007).
3
The meaning of the term ego, as Fairbairn uses it, is better conveyed by the term self since all the split-
off ‘parts’ of ‘the ego’ are sub-organizations of the self. Fairbairn (1943) drops the term id from his
lexicon because he views one’s impulses and passions as integral parts of the ego ⁄ self. In discussing
Fairbairn’s ideas, I will use the term ego and self interchangeably.
4
For Fairbairn, all unconscious endopsychic structures are split-off parts of the ego ⁄ self; and yet he
misleadingly uses the term internal objects to refer to these split-off parts of the self, which are more
accurately termed internal subjects.
ing internal ‘objects’ have a not-me feel to them because they are parts of
the self that are thoroughly identified with the unloving mother in her excit-
ing and rejecting qualities (see Ogden, 1986a, 1986b, for a discussion of the
concept of internal objects and internal object relations).
Fairbairn (1944, 1963) believes that the internalization of the unsatisfac-
tory object is a defensive measure carried out in an effort to control the
unsatisfactory object. But, to my mind, the illusory control that the child
achieves by means of this internalization only in part accounts for the
immense psychic power of the internal object world to remain a ‘‘closed sys-
tem of internal reality’’ (Fairbairn, 1958, p. 385), i.e. to maintain its isola-
tion from the real world. Despite the fact that split-off and repressed
aspects of the ego (the internal saboteur and libidinal ego) feel intense
resentment toward, and feelings of being callously spurned by, the unloving
and unaccepting object, Fairbairn (1944) states that the ties between these
split-off parts of the self and the internalized unloving object are libidinal in
nature.
The libidinal nature of these ties suggests that aspects of the individual
(the internal saboteur and the libidinal ego) have by no means given up on
the potential of the unsatisfactory object to give and receive love. It seems
to me that a libidinal tie to an internal object toward whom one feels anger,
resentment, and the like, necessarily involves an (unconscious) wish ⁄ need to
use what control one feels one has to change the unloving and unaccepting
(internal) object into a loving and accepting one.
From this vantage point, I view the libidinal ego and the internal saboteur
as aspects of self that are intent on transforming the exciting object and the
rejecting object into loving objects. Moreover, it seems to me, by extension
of Fairbairn’s thinking, that the infant’s effort to transform unsatisfactory
objects into satisfactory objects – thus reversing the imagined toxic effect on
the mother of the infant’s love–- is the single most important motivation sus-
taining the structure of the internal object world. And that structure, when
externalized, underlies all pathological external object relationships.
Addictive love (the bond between the libidinal ego and the
exciting object)
As I understand Fairbairn’s theory of internal object relationships, all
the love and hate that tie internal objects to one another is inherently
Fig. 1. Relationships among the psychic structures (adapted from Fairbairn, 1944, p. 105; permission
kindly granted by Routledge Kegan Paul)
Key: CE, Central Ego; IS, Internal Saboteur; LE, Libidinal Ego; RO, Rejecting Object; E & Exciting
Object; Cs, Conscious; Pcs, Preconcious; Ucs, Unconscious. !, Agression; =, Libido
is an empty shell, a lost and forgotten part of the past, in the absence of the
obsession on the part of the internal saboteur to wring love, remorse and
magical reparation from it. This internal object relationship (like the rela-
tionship of the libidinal ego and the exciting object) is a relationship in
which the jailer is a prisoner of the jailed, and the jailed, a prisoner of the
jailer. Outside the terms of their pathological, mutually dependent ‘love,’
neither would hold meaning for the other or for itself (much less for any
other part of the self). In the absence of one, the other would become a
mere remnant of a once powerful pair of deities that reigned in a religion
no longer practiced.
A particular clinical experience comes to mind in connection with the
power of the bond between the internal saboteur and the rejecting object.
I was asked by the chairperson of a social service agency to serve as a con-
sultant to the psychotherapy division of the agency. The members of the
staff of that part of the organization were in constant conflict with one
another and with the rest of the agency.5 The director of the psychotherapy
division, a psychiatrist in his early 50s, oversaw a staff composed of three
male psychiatrists and six female psychologists and social workers, all in
their 30s and 40s. The director showed consistent favoritism toward the male
psychiatrists, not only in his praise of their ideas, but also in appointing
them to leadership positions (which paid higher salaries). The women thera-
pists, most of whom had worked in this agency for many years, made no
secret of their discontent with the director.
In the course of speaking in confidence with individual members of the
staff, I was struck by the fact that, while each of the female psychotherapists
expressed intense anger and bitterness about the way she was being treated
by the director, they all felt that they had no choice but to remain working
at the clinic. They told me that psychiatric services at the other agencies and
hospitals in the area were being shut down, so they had no choice but to
stay. But none had interviewed at other hospitals or social service agencies.
In my conversations with the director of the division, he spoke to me as a
fellow psychiatrist whom he believed would understand the inevitable diffi-
culty involved in working with ‘non-medical’ female psychotherapists who
invariably become ensnarled in ‘oedipal attachments and rivalries’ with one
another and with the ‘medical’ group leader.
My consultation to the clinic was ended abruptly after three months when
the city’s funding for all mental health services was cut sharply and the psy-
chotherapy division of this clinic was shut down. One of the female staff
members, whom I later met by chance at a lecture, told me: ‘‘On looking
back on it, I feel as if I was living as a child in a psychotic family. I couldn’t
imagine leaving and finding other work. It felt as if I would end up living in
a cardboard box if I were to leave. My whole world had shrunk to the size
of that clinic. If the clinic hadn’t closed, I’m certain I would still be working
there.’’ She described the former director of the psychotherapy division as
5
While Fairbairn (1944) believed that his understanding of the psyche ‘‘provides a more satisfactory basis
than does any other type of psychology for the explanation of group phenomena’’ (p. 128), he did not
develop or clinically illustrate this idea in any of his writings.
‘‘a very limited person who hates women and gets pleasure out of humiliat-
ing them in a way that he feels no need to hide.’’ ‘‘But,’’ she added, ‘‘the
really frightening thing for me is that I couldn’t leave. The situation was not
only bad at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it at night, over the week-
ends, or even when I was on vacation. It was as if I was infected by the situ-
ation.’’
It seems to me that all the participants in this drama felt and behaved as
if their lives depended on the perpetuation of the tie between the tormentor
and the aggrieved. The director, the three psychiatrists (who said they felt
‘caught in the middle,’ but did nothing to address the patent unfairness),
and the female staff, all felt wronged. No one seemed to recognize the ways
in which he or she actively and passively provoked feelings of anger, help-
lessness, outrage and resentment in the others. In retrospect, it seems to me
that what I was witnessing might be thought of as a rather intense form of
the bond of mutual dependence tying the internal saboteur and the rejecting
object to one another.
exciting object. The internal saboteur views the exciting object as a mali-
cious tease, a seductress, a bundle of empty promises: You [the exciting
object] don’t fool me. You may be able to make a fool of him [the libidinal
ego], but I know your type, I’ve heard your lies, I’ve seen your depraved imi-
tations of love. You’re a parasite; you take, but you don’t know what it
means to give. You prey on the gullible, on children.
At first blush, the internal saboteur deserves its name: it demeans and
shames the libidinal ego for its infantile longings, and attacks the exciting
object for its endless appetite for tantalizing, seducing, deceiving and humili-
ating. But the contempt and disdain that the internal saboteur feels towards
the libidinal ego and the exciting object are born of its feelings of self-
hatred, impotence and shame concerning its own nave, self-deluding, infan-
tile pursuit of the love of the rejecting object (for example, in the clinical
example presented earlier, the futile pursuit of the love of the director by
the female members of the therapy staff). I believe that implicit in Fairb-
airn’s rendering of the structure of the internal object world is the idea that
the fury and contempt that the internal saboteur heaps upon the libidinal
ego and the exciting object stem from a glimmer of recognition of the shame
and humiliation it feels about its own absolute dependence on, and loyalty
to, the rejecting (internal object) mother.
Attacks by the internal saboteur on the libidinal ego and the exciting
object may take a broad range of forms in the analytic situation. In my
work with Ms. T, an analysand I saw over a period of many years in a
five-session-per-week analysis, I could do nothing right. If I spoke, I was
‘missing the point’; if I was quiet, I was ‘being a stereotypic analyst’ spew-
ing pronouncements from behind the couch. If I was punctual, I was ‘being
obsessional’; if I was a minute late, I was ‘dreading’ seeing her. In a session
with this patient in the fourth year of analysis, an image came to my mind
of a homeless man sitting on the curb near a traffic light. It seemed that he
had given up on begging, and that it would not be long before he died. Pro-
foundly disturbed by this image, I began to become aware of my own feeling
that for a number of months I had given up on ever being seen by the
patient for whom I was, and, in return, I had given up on trying to be an
analyst to her. It was not that I had simply made mistakes. The situation
felt to me to be far worse than that: I, myself, was the mistake. My very
being was wrong for her.
An integral part of my effort to make therapeutic use of the feeling state that
I was beginning to recognize and put into words for myself involved thinking
of myself as having experienced something like the patient’s feeling that her
very way of being was wrong (a far worse problem than feeling that she had
made a great many serious errors).6 I eventually said to Ms. T: ‘‘For a long
time, you have been telling me that I simply cannot understand you and that
virtually everything I say confirms that. I don’t think you’ve been any harsher
with me than you are with yourself. In fact, I think that your attacks on your-
6
Fairbairn (1944) notes that in the world of unconscious internal object relationships, feeling guilty about
one’s failures and misdeeds is far preferable to feeling ‘‘unconditionally, i.e. libidinally bad’’ (p. 93). To
feel unconditionally bad is to feel that one’s love is bad.
self are far more violent than your attacks on me. I think that you feel not only
that everything you do is wrong, you firmly believe that your very existence is
wrong and that the only thing you can do to remedy that situation is to
become another person. Of course, if you were to succeed in doing so, you
would be dead: worse than that, you would never have existed.’’
Ms. T responded immediately by saying that I was being very wordy. As
she said this, I felt deflated and realized that, despite years of experience
with this patient, I had actually expected that this time she would at least
consider what I had said. I told this to the patient and after a few moments
of silence, she said: ‘‘Please don’t give up on me.’’ In Fairbairn’s terms, the
patient, at least for this moment, had softened her intrapsychic attack on
herself (the attack of the internal saboteur on the libidinal ego for its way of
loving). She allowed herself not only to accept her dependence on me, but
also to ask something of me (as a separate person) that she knew she could
not provide for herself.
3. Psychological growth
In the final section of this paper, I will discuss some of the ways in which a
person may be helped to grow psychologically. Fairbairn regards as
‘‘relatively immutable’’ (1944, p. 129) the ‘‘basic endopsychic situation,’’ i.e.
the constellations of split-off and repressed aspects of the central ego. For
Fairbairn, the psychological changes that can be achieved through psycho-
analysis primarily involve diminutions of the intensity of the feelings of
resentment, addictive love, contempt, primitive dependence, disillusionment,
and so on that bind the split off, repressed sub-organizations of the self to
one another. Specifically, healthy psychological change can be achieved by
reducing to a minimum:
(a) the attachment of the subsidiary egos [the internal saboteur and the libidinal
ego] to their respective associated objects [the rejecting object and the exciting
object], (b) the aggression of the central ego towards the subsidiary egos and their
objects [which takes the form of repression of the two pairs of split off parts of the
self], and (c) the aggression of the internal saboteur towards the libidinal ego and
its object [the exciting object].
(Fairbairn, 1944, p. 130)
The density of the prose, the mechanical nature of the metaphors, the
level of abstraction, the heavy reliance on his own technical terminology,
together denude Fairbairn’s statement of almost anything recognizable as
human experience. I will offer an alternative way of speaking and thinking
about how people grow psychologically that relies less on Fairbairn’s explic-
itly stated ideas and more on ideas that I find to be implicit in his work.
Although Fairbairn never puts it in this way, I believe that the most funda-
mental psychological principle underlying his conception of psychological
growth is the idea that all psychological maturation involves the patient’s
genuine acceptance of himself and, by extension, acceptance of others. That
acceptance is achieved by means of the work of coming to terms with the
full range of aspects of oneself, including one’s disturbing, infantile, split-off
identifications with one’s unloving, unaccepting mother. Psychological
change of this sort creates the possibility of discovering a world of people
and experiences that exists outside of oneself, a world in which it is possible
to feel curious, surprised, delighted, disappointed, homesick, and so on. The
world of thought, feeling and human relatedness that is opened by such
self-acceptance is a world in which one feels no compulsion to transform
the realities of one’s human relationships into something other than what
they are, i.e. to change oneself or ‘the object’ (who is now a whole and sepa-
rate subject) into other people. It is also a world in which one can learn
from one’s experience with other people because those experiences are no
longer dominated by projections of static internal object relationships.
A particular analytic experience comes to mind in this regard. Mr. C, the
patient with cerebral palsy whom I discussed earlier, had, as a child, been
savaged by his mother. As I have described, in adult life he became pos-
sessed by a ‘love’ for Ms. Z. Over a period of eight years, Ms. Z twice relo-
cated to a different city; both times the patient followed. Again and again,
she tried to make it clear to Mr. C that she liked him as a friend, but did
from inside the baby. This was not a dream of triumph; it was an ordinary
dream of ordinary love: ‘nothing much happened.’
I was deeply moved by the patient’s telling me his dream. I said to him:
‘‘What a wonderful dream that was.’’
Some years later, Mr. C moved to another part of the country to take a
high-level job in his field. He wrote to me periodically. In the last letter that
I received from him (about five years after we stopped working together), he
told me that he had married a woman he loved, a woman who had cerebral
palsy. They had recently had a healthy baby girl.
Mr. C, in the context of the developing relationship with me, was able to
extricate himself from his addictive love of Ms. Z (a bond between the libidi-
nal ego and the exciting object) while, at the same time, diminishing his
compulsive engagement in forms of relatedness based on the bond between
the debasing and the debased aspects of himself (the bond between the
internal saboteur and the libidinal ego).
It seems to me that a key element of the therapeutic action of the work
that Mr. C and I did together was the real (as opposed to the transferential)
relationship between the two of us (for example, in my genuinely not feeling
repulsed by the mucous, tears and saliva flowing from his nose, eyes and
mouth as he bellowed in pain, and by my experiencing love for him of a
sort that, later in my life, I would feel for my infant sons). Fairbairn,
I think, would agree with this understanding and go a step further: ‘‘The
really decisive [therapeutic] factor is the relationship of the patient to the
analyst’’ (Fairbairn, 1958, p. 379) He elaborated on this idea a bit later in
the same paper:
Psycho-analytical treatment resolves itself into a struggle on the part of the patient to
press-gang his relationship with the analyst into the closed system of the inner world
through the agency of transference, and a determination on the part of the analyst to
effect a breach in this closed system and to provide conditions under which, in the set-
ting of a therapeutic relationship, the patient may be induced to accept the open sys-
tem of outer reality.
(Fairbairn, 1958, p. 385, italics in the original)
Concluding comments
Psychological growth, for Fairbairn (as I read him), involves a form of
acceptance of oneself that can be achieved only in the context of a real
relationship with a relatively psychologically mature person. A relationship
of this sort (including the analytic relationship) is the only possible exit
from the solipsistic world of internal object relationships. Self-acceptance
is a state of mind that marks the (never fully achieved) relinquishment of
the life-consuming effort to transform unsatisfactory internal object rela-
tionships into satisfactory (i.e. loving and accepting) ones. With psycho-
logical growth, one comes to know at a depth that one’s early experiences
with one’s unloving and unaccepting mother will never be other than what
they were. It is a waste of life to devote oneself to the effort to transform
oneself (and others) into the people one wishes one were (or wishes they
were). In order to take part in experience in a world populated by people
whom one has not invented, and from whom one may learn, the individ-
ual must first loosen the unconscious bonds of resentment, addictive love,
contempt and disillusionment that confine him to a life lived principally in
his mind.
Translations of summary
Warum Fairbairn lesen? Der Autor interpretiert Teile des Fairbairnschen Werks, indem er nicht nur
Fairbairns Denken erklrt und klrt, sondern eigene berlegungen entwickelt, indem er Konzepte formu-
liert, die Fairbairns Werk seiner Meinung nach inhrent sind oder folgerichtige Erweiterungen desselben
reprsentieren. Zu den impliziten oder nicht vollstndig ausgearbeiteten Aspekten von Fairbairns Werk,
die der Autor diskutiert, zhlen (1) die berlegung, dass die Bildung der inneren Objektwelt partiell
immer eine Reaktion auf ein Trauma darstellt (reale Unfhigkeit der Mutter, ihrem Sugling zu vermit-
teln, dass sie ihn liebt und seine Liebe annimmt); (2) die berlegung, dass die unaufhçrlichen Bemhun-
gen des Suglings, die internalisierte Beziehung zur lieblosen Mutter in eine Liebesbeziehung zu
transformieren – und auf diese Weise die Wirkung seiner (imaginierten) ,,toxischen Liebe’’ auf die Mutter
ins Gegenteil zu verwandeln – die wichtigste Motivation berhaupt ist, die die Struktur der inneren Ob-
jektwelt aufrechterhlt; (3) die berlegung, dass Angriffe auf das Selbst – die aufgrund seiner Art zu lie-
ben erfolgen – zwar selbstdestruktiv sind, aber einen Hauch Einsicht in den eigenen Selbsthass und in
die Scham ber die eigenen unaufhçrlichen, vergeblichen Versuche enthalten, sich selbst (oder das ablehn-
ende Objekt) in jemand anderen zu verwandeln. Auf der Grundlage seiner klinischen Arbeit illustriert
der Autor, wie er sein Verstndnis des ,,Gefhlslebens’’ innerer Objekte zur Anwendung bringt, um die
emotionale Weiterentwicklung des Patienten zu fçrdern.
¿Por qué leer a Fairbairn? El autor lleva a cabo una lectura minuciosa de partes de la obra de Fairb-
airn, a travs de la cual no slo explica y aclara el pensamiento de Fairbairn, sino tambin genera sus
propias ideas mediante el desarrollo de conceptos que, segffln su opinin, est n impl
citos en la obra de
Fairbairn o son extensiones lgicas de sta. Entre los aspectos no explicitados (o poco desarrollados) de
la contribucin de Fairbairn que el autor analiza se hallan: (1) la idea de que la formacin del mundo
objetal interno es siempre, en parte, una reaccin al trauma (falla real de la madre para transmitirle a su
beb que lo quiere y que acepta su amor); (2) la nocin de que los esfuerzos incesantes del beb para
transformar la relacin internalizada con la madre desamorada en una relacin de amor – revirtiendo
as
el efecto sobre la madre de su (imaginado) ‘amor txico’ – es la motivacin m s importante que
sostiene la estructura del mundo objetal interno; y (3) la idea de que atacarse a s
mismo por la manera
en que uno ama, si bien es autodestructivo, implica un atisbo de comprensin del auto-odio y la vergen-
za causados por los propios continuos y vanos intentos de transformarse a uno mismo (o al objeto rec-
hazante) en otra persona. Utilizando su propio trabajo cr
tico, el autor ilustra la manera en que utiliza
su comprensin de la ‘vida afectiva’ de los objetos internos para facilitar el crecimiento afectivo del
paciente.
Pourquoi lire Fairbairn? A partir d’une lecture attentive d’extraits de l’œuvre de Fairbairn, l’auteur
explicite et clarifie la pense de Fairbairn, en mÞme temps qu’il labore ses propres ides en dveloppant
des concepts qui, selon lui, seraient implicitement contenus dans les travaux de Fairbairn ou encore qui
apparaitraient comme leur extension logique. Parmi ces notions implicites ou simplement esquisses dans
l’œuvre de Fairbairn, l’auteur distingue en particulier: (1) l’ide que la formation du monde objectal
interne constitue toujours en partie une raction a un trauma (l’chec de la mre transmettre son
bb le sentiment qu’elle l’aime et qu’elle accepte son amour lui); (2) l’ide que les efforts incessants du
bb pour transformer la relation interne la mre non aimante en une relation d’amour – dans une ten-
tative d’inverser l’effet sur la mre de son ‘amour toxique’ (imaginaire) lui (le bb) – est le motif le
plus important sous-tendant la structure du monde objectal interne; et (3) l’ide que les auto-reproches,
sous forme d’attaques, quant la faÅon d’aimer, tout en tant autodestructeurs, contiennent une parcelle
d’insight quant la haine de soi et la honte relative aux tentatives indfiniment vaines de se changer soi-
mÞme (ou l’objet rejetant) en une personne diffrente. En s’tayant sur son travail clinique, l’auteur illus-
tre la faÅon dont il utilise sa comprhension de la ‘vie motionnelle’ des objets internes afin de faciliter la
croissance motionnelle du patient.
Perché leggere Fairbairn? L’autore offre un’attenta lettura di alcune parti dell’opera di Fairbairn in
cui non solo ne spiega e ne chiarisce il pensiero, ma propone idee personali sviluppando concetti che egli
ritiene impliciti nel lavoro di Fairbairn e che possono pertanto essere considerati come estensioni logiche.
L’autore esamina in particolare tre idee, presenti in nuce ma non pienamente sviluppate, nel lavoro di
Fairbairn: (1) L’idea che la formazione di un oggetto interno sia sempre, in parte, la risposta a
un trauma (mancanza reale da parte della madre di comunicare il suo amore e di accettare quello del
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