The International Journal of

Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91:101–118 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00219.x

Why read Fairbairn?

Thomas H. Ogden
306 Laurel Street, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA – [email protected]

(Final version accepted 1 July 2009)

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.

Keywords: addictive love, character, contempt, Fairbairn, internal objects, internal

saboteur, metapsychology, resentment, trauma, transference

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).

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Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the Institute of Psychoanalysis
102 T. H. Ogden

To my mind, Fairbairn’s theory of internal object relations constitutes one

of the most important contributions to the development of analytic theory
in its first century. Yet, judging from the scarcity of references to his work
in the analytic literature, particularly in North American and Latin Ameri-
can writing, his theoretical ideas (for example, ideas that he introduced in
his 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1944 papers) and his clinical thinking (which he
presented in his 1956 and 1958 papers) have attracted far less interest and
study than have other major 20th century analytic theorists such as Klein,
Winnicott and Bion. In part this is due to the fact that Fairbairn worked in
isolation in Edinburgh. He had little opportunity for personal involvement
or intellectual exchange with colleagues at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in
London whose members, in his era, included Balint, Bion, Anna Freud,
Heimann, Klein, Milner, Rosenfeld, Segal, and Winnicott (Sutherland,
1989). Consequently, exposure to his work, even for his contemporaries, was
almost entirely through his writing.
Fairbairn’s relatively marginalized place in psychoanalysis today also
derives, I believe, from the fact that the reader who undertakes the study of
Fairbairn finds himself confronted by a dense prose style, a highly abstract
form of theorizing and a set of unfamiliar theoretical terms (for example,
dynamic structure, endopsychic structure, central ego, internal saboteur,
libidinal ego, exciting object, rejecting object, and so on) that have not
been adopted by subsequent analytic theorists.2
In this paper, it is not my intention simply to offer an explication and
clarification of Fairbairn’s thinking; rather, in the process of looking closely
at Fairbairn’s work (particularly, his papers Schizoid factors in the personal-
ity [1940] and Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object-
relationships [1944]), I develop what I believe to be several important
implications and extensions of his thinking. I attempt to make something of
my own with Fairbairn’s writings, in part, by means of a close reading of
his texts, and, in part, by clinically illustrating how Fairbairn’s ideas have
shaped, and evolved in, my own analytic work.

1. Elements of Fairbairn’s revision of psychoanalytic theory

For Fairbairn, the most difficult and most psychically formative psychologi-
cal problem that the infant or child faces is the dilemma that arises when he
experiences his mother (upon whom he is utterly dependent) as both loving
and accepting of his love, and unloving and rejecting of his love. Fairbairn’s
writing contains a critical ambiguity concerning this core human dilemma.
The language that Fairbairn uses repeatedly raises in the reader’s mind the
questions: Is every infant traumatized by experiences of deficits in his
mother’s love for him? Or does the infant misinterpret inevitable (and neces-
sary) frustrations as manifestations of his mother’s failure to love him?
2
Although Fairbairn’s terminology is little used currently, his ideas have had considerable impact on the
thinking of leading analytic theorists including Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), Grotstein (1994), Guntrip
(1968), Kernberg (1980), Klein (1946), Kohut (1971), Modell (1968), Rinsley (1977), Scharff and Scharff
(1994), Sutherland (1989) and Symington (1986). It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the ways
in which these authors have critiqued, modified and extended Fairbairn’s thinking.

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Why read Fairbairn? 103

There is ample evidence in Fairbairn’s work to support both conclusions.

For instance, in support of the idea that the infant responds to privation as
if it were willful rejection on the part of the mother, Fairbairn writes:
Here it must be pointed out that what presents itself to him [the infant or child]
from a strictly conative standpoint as frustration at the hands of his mother presents
itself to him in a very different light from a strictly affective standpoint. From the
latter standpoint, what he experiences is a sense of lack of love, and indeed
emotional rejection on his mother’s part.
(Fairbairn, 1944, pp. 112–13, italics in original)
At the same time, there is a persistent logic in Fairbairn’s work that sup-
ports the idea that every infant realistically perceives the limits of his
mother’s capacity to love him and that this realistic perception is ‘‘trau-
matic’’ (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 110) for the infant or child. This logic goes as
follows: (1) ‘‘… Everybody without exception must be regarded as schizoid’’
(Fairbairn, 1940, p. 7), that is, everyone evidences pathological splitting of
the self; individuals differ from one another only in the severity of their schi-
zoid pathology. (2) Schizoid psychopathology has its origins in an ‘‘unsatis-
factory’’ (1940, p. 13) relationship with the mother, i.e. there is a ‘‘failure on
the part of the mother to convince the child that she really loves him as a
person’’ (p. 13). (3) Since everyone is schizoid, and the schizoid condition
derives from maternal failure to convince the infant of her love, it follows
that every infant experiences traumatizing maternal failure to love. But the
language used in this logical sequence leaves open an important ambiguity.
Does ‘‘failure on the part of the mother to convince the child that she really
loves him as a person’’ (1940, p. 13) reflect the mother’s failure to be con-
vincing, or does it reflect the child’s failure ⁄ inability to be convinced, i.e.
the child’s inability to accept love? The phrase ‘failure on the part of the
mother,’ to my ear, leans in the direction of the former interpretation, but,
by no means, rules out the latter. Overall, in Fairbairn’s work, ambiguity of
language in this connection serves to convey what I believe to be Fairbairn’s
view that every infant or child accurately perceives the limits of the mother’s
ability to love him; and, at the same time, every infant or child misinterprets
inevitable privations as the mother’s lack of love for him. From this vantage
point, Fairbairn’s conception of early psychic development is a trauma the-
ory in which the infant, to varying degrees, is traumatized by his realistic
perception that he is fully dependent on a mother whose capacity to love
him has passed its breaking point. (To my mind, Fairbairn’s and Klein’s
object relations theories are complementary, and this complementarity cre-
ates the opportunity for us, as analysts, to think ⁄ see with ‘‘binocular vision’’
[Bion, 1962, p. 86]. Fairbairn believes in the primacy of external reality and
the secondary role of unconscious phantasy while Klein believes in the pri-
mary role of unconscious phantasy and the secondary effect of external real-
ity. [Space does not allow for an elaboration of the comparison of
Fairbairn’s and Klein’s object relations theories.])
Fairbairn (1944) believes that the infant’s subjective sense that his
mother, upon whom he depends utterly, is unable to love him generates
‘‘an affective experience which is singularly devastating’’ (p. 113). For an

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104 T. H. Ogden

older child, the experience of loving the mother who is experienced as

unloving and unaccepting of his love is one of ‘‘intense humiliation’’ (p.
113). ‘‘At a somewhat deeper level (or at an earlier stage) the experience is
one of shame over the display of needs which are disregarded or belittled’’
(p. 113). The child ‘‘feels reduced to a state of worthlessness, destitution
or beggardom’’ (p. 113). ‘‘At the same time his sense of badness [for
demanding too much] is further complicated by the sense of utter impo-
tence …’’ (p. 113).
But the pain of the feelings of shame, worthlessness, beggardom, badness
and impotence is not the most catastrophic consequence of the infant’s
dependence on a mother whom he experiences as unloving and unaccepting
of his love. Even more devastating is the threat to the infant’s very existence
posed by that relationship:
At a still deeper level (or at a still earlier stage) the child’s experience is one of, so
to speak, exploding ineffectively and being completely emptied of libido. It is thus
an experience of disintegration and of imminent psychical death …[In being] threa-
tened with loss of his libido [love] (which for him constitutes his own goodness) …
[he is threatened by the loss of what] constitutes himself.
(Fairbairn, 1944, p. 113)
In other words, a universal part of earliest postnatal human existence is
the terrifying experience of imminent loss of one’s self, loss of one’s life.
What’s more, the infant or child
feels that the reason for his mother’s apparent lack of love towards him is that he
has destroyed her affection and made it disappear. At the same time he feels that
the reason for her apparent refusal to accept his love is that his own love is destruc-
tive and bad.
(Fairbairn, 1940, p. 25)
The infant persists in his love of ‘‘bad objects’’ (Fairbairn, 1943, p. 67)
because bad objects are better than no objects at all: ‘‘he [the infant or
child] needs them [maternal objects] … he cannot do without them’’ (p. 67,
italics in original). Hence, the infant cannot abandon his attempts to re-
establish a loving tie to the unloving and unaccepting mother. The infant, in
clinging to the unloving mother, is attempting to undo the imagined toxic
effects of his own love. But if the infant persists too long in attempting to
wring love from the unloving mother, he will suffer ‘‘disintegration and …
imminent psychical death’’ (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 113).
From this vantage point, the most important (life-sustaining) task faced
by the infant is not simply that of establishing and maintaining a loving tie
with the mother who is capable of giving and receiving love. At least as
important to the psychical survival of the infant is his capacity to extricate
himself from his futile efforts to wring love from the external object mother
who is experienced as unloving. The infant achieves this life-saving psycho-
logical maneuver by developing an internal object world (an aspect of mind)
in which the relationship with the external unloving mother is transformed
into an internal object relationship.
The infant incorporates the breast in order to control it: ‘‘relationships
with internalized objects, [are relationships] to which the individual is

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Why read Fairbairn? 105

compelled to turn in default of a satisfactory relationship with objects in the

outer world’’ (Fairbairn, 1941, p. 40, italics in original). In replacing a real
external object relationship with an internal one, the infant staunches the
hemorrhaging of libido (his ‘‘nascent love’’ [1944, p. 113]) into an emotional
vacuum (the mother who, for real and imagined reasons, is experienced as
unloving). By creating an internal object relationship with the unloving
mother, the infant directs his nascent object love toward an internal object,
an object that is a part of himself. (Every aspect of one’s mind – including
all the ‘internalized figures’ constituting one’s internal object world – is nec-
essarily an aspect of oneself.)
For Fairbairn, an internal object relationship constitutes a real relation-
ship between aspects of the ego.3 Fairbairn (1943, 1944) reminds the reader
again and again that to conceive of internal object relationships as relation-
ships between a pair of split-off parts of the ego is to do nothing more than
to elaborate on Freud’s (1917) conception of the creation of the ‘‘critical
agency’’ (p. 248) (later to be called the superego). In Mourning and melan-
cholia, Freud (1917) describes the process by which two parts of the ego are
split off from the main body of the ego (the ‘I’) and enter into an uncon-
scious relationship with one another. In melancholia, a part of the self (that
harbors feelings of impotent rage toward the abandoning object) enters into
a stable internal object relationship with another split-off part of the ego
(that is identified with the abandoning object). In this way, an actual uncon-
scious object relationship between different aspects of the self is established
and maintained. The upshot of this splitting of the ego, in Freud’s view, is
an unconscious feeling that one has not lost the object since the abandoning
object has been replaced by a part of oneself. Thus, Fairbairn’s theory of
internal object relationships represents both an elaboration of Freud’s think-
ing (see Ogden, 2002, for a discussion of the origins of object-relations the-
ory in Mourning and melancholia) and a radical departure from it (in his
understanding of endopsychic structure and the nature of internal object
relationships).
Having discussed the infant’s replacement of unsatisfactory external object
relationships with internal ones, I will now turn to Fairbairn’s conception of
the internal object world (‘‘the basic endopsychic situation’’ [1944, p. 106])
that results from internalization of the unsatisfactory relationship with the
mother.
To understand Fairbairn’s conception of the development of the psyche it
is necessary to understand his notion of ‘‘endopsychic structure’’ (1944,
p. 120). In brief, an endopsychic structure is a sub-organization of the self
(split off from the main ‘body’ of the ego ⁄ self).4 Fairbairn believes that it is
erroneous to separate ‘endopsychic structures’ (parts of the self capable of

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.

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106 T. H. Ogden

thinking, feeling, remembering and responding in their own distinctive ways)

from ‘psychic dynamism’ (our impulses, wishes, needs and desires). Fairb-
airn (1943, 1944) differs in this regard with Freud and Klein in that he
believes that it is inaccurate to posit an aspect of the self (the ego ⁄ I) that is
devoid of impulses, wishes and desires: What is a self devoid of desires and
impulses? Similarly, the idea of desire or impulse divorced from the self ⁄
ego ⁄ I that is desiring or feels impelled, is, for Fairbairn, ‘‘utterly meaning-
less’’ (1944, p. 95): ‘‘‘impulses’ are inseparable from an ego structure with a
definite pattern’’ (1944, p. 90). Note that Fairbairn specifies that the ‘‘ego
structure’’ has ‘‘a definite pattern.’’ This idea reflects his view that each
‘‘ego structure’’ (i.e. each aspect of the self) has its own unique organization
that defines the way it experiences and responds to its perceptions, needs
and desires. Feeling slighted, for example, is a different experience for each
ego structure (i.e. each quasi-autonomous aspect of the self) and elicits from
each ego structure qualitatively different emotional responses (for example,
feelings of resentment, contempt, vindictiveness and so on).
In an effort to simplify, and thereby gain some control over the internal-
ized relationship with the unloving mother, the infant engages in a ‘‘divide
et impera’’ (1944, p. 112) maneuver. The infant divides the unloving (inter-
nal object) mother into two parts: the tantalizing mother and the rejecting
mother. Fairbairn does not explain how he has arrived at the idea that the
infant divides his experience of the unloving mother into tantalizing and
rejecting parts. (Why not postulate jealous and murderous parts, or poison-
ous and devouring parts?) As we do with Freud’s even bolder proposal that
all human motivations are derived from the sexual instinct and the ego (or
survival) instinct (later replaced by the death instinct), we must suspend
judgment while we examine the theoretical and clinical consequences of the
author’s hypothesis.
Fairbairn (1944) proposes that an aspect of the infant’s personality feels
powerfully, uncontrollably attached to the alluring aspect of the internal
object mother, while another aspect of the infant’s personality feels hope-
lessly attached to the rejecting aspect of the internal object mother. Both
parts of the infant’s psyche – the part emotionally bound to the alluring
mother and the part bound to the rejecting mother – are ‘‘split off’’ (1944,
p. 112) from the healthy, main body of the ego (which Fairbairn terms the
central ego). At the same time, aspects of the infant’s personality that are
thoroughly identified with the alluring and with the rejecting aspects of the
mother are also split off from the central ego. Thus, two repressed internal
object relationships (made up of four split-off parts of the central ego) are
created: (1) the relationship of the tantalized self (termed by Fairbairn the
libidinal ego) and the tantalizing self-identified-with-the-object (the exciting
object), and (2) the relationship of the rejected self (the internal saboteur)
and the rejecting self-identified-with-the-object (the rejecting object). These
two sets of internal object relationships are angrily rejected (i.e. repressed)
by the central ego because the healthy aspect of the infant’s personality (the
central ego) feels intense anger at the unloving internal object mother.
The exciting object and the rejecting object are no less parts of the self
than are the libidinal ego and the internal saboteur. The exciting and reject-

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Why read Fairbairn? 107

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.

2. The ‘emotional life’ of Fairbairn’s internal objects

Fairbairn (1944, p. 105) provides a diagram depicting the relationships
among the psychic structures that I have just described (see Figure 1 below).
It has been my experience in reading and teaching Fairbairn that a familiar-
ity with this diagram is useful in one’s efforts to grasp the nature of the
internal object world as Fairbairn conceives of it. Since the diagram neces-
sarily has a mechanical, nonhuman quality to it, in what follows I try to
convey what I believe to be the nature of the ‘emotional life’ of each of the
internal objects constituting Fairbairn’s internal object world.

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

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108 T. H. Ogden

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

pathological because it is derived entirely from the pathological tie of the

infant to the unreachable mother, i.e. to the mother who is felt to be incapa-
ble of giving and receiving love. The relationship between the libidinal ego
and the exciting object is one of addictive ‘love’ on the part of the libidinal
ego, and of desperate need on the part of the exciting object to elicit desire
from the libidinal ego (which desire the exciting object will never satisfy).
When I imagine the libidinal ego and the exciting object as characters in
an internal drama, I often think of a patient with whom I worked many
years ago in twice weekly face-to-face psychotherapy. The patient, Mr. C,
was a man in his early 30s with cerebral palsy, who was desperately in love
with Ms. Z, a ‘beautiful’ woman friend (who did not have cerebral palsy or
any other physical impairment). In the course of years of this ‘friendship,’
the patient’s advances became more insistent and beseeching. This eventually
led Ms. C to end the relationship altogether. Mr. C, who found it difficult to
articulate words under the best of circumstances, would bellow in pain
during our sessions as he tried to talk about how much he loved Ms. Z.
Mr. C insisted that Ms. Z must love him because she enjoyed his sense of
humor and had invited him to two parties at her apartment. Although
I only knew Ms. Z from my experience with Mr. C (including my transfer-
ence–countertransference experience), I suspected that Ms. Z was drawn to
Mr. C in an unconscious pathological way. I based this suspicion, in part,
on the fact that, in my work with Mr. C, I regularly had the wish not only
to soothe him but also to ‘cure’ him of his cerebral palsy. I came to see the

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Why read Fairbairn? 109

latter wish as a reflection of my own inability to appreciate and accept him

as he was, and, instead, to turn to magical solutions. To have acted on these
feelings, for example, by speaking to Mr. C in a way that implicitly promised
‘cure,’ would have been to encourage the patient to become utterly depen-
dent on me for continued magical evasion of reality. Under such circum-
stances, there would have been no opportunity for Mr. C to grow and to
achieve genuine maturity and independence. It seems to me that the out-
come of the analytic work depended upon my ability to recognize, think
about, and come to terms with my own needs to keep Mr. C endlessly
dependent on me.
To my mind, Mr. C’s ‘love relationship’ with Ms. Z (and with me in the
aspect of the transference–countertransference that involved my unconscious
wish to ‘cure’ him) was an expression of a pathological mutual dependence.
In Fairbairn’s terms, this emotional situation might be thought of as the tie
between the libidinal ego and the exciting object. Such relationships involve
psychic bondage in which the participants are each jailer and jailed, stalker
and stalked. (I will further discuss my work with Mr. C later in this paper
when I address the subject of psychological growth.)

Bonds of resentment (the tie between the internal saboteur

and the rejecting object)
The relationship between the internal saboteur and the rejecting object
derives from the infant’s love of his mother despite (and because of) her
rejection of him. The nature of the pathological love that binds together the
internal saboteur and the rejecting object is a bond not of hate, but of a
pathological love that is experienced as bitter ‘‘resentment’’ (Fairbairn,
1944, p. 115). Neither the rejecting object nor the internal saboteur is willing
or able to think about, much less relinquish, that tie. In fact, there is no
desire on the part of either to change anything about their mutual depen-
dence. The power of that bond is impossible to overestimate. The rejecting
object and the internal saboteur are determined to nurse their feelings of
having been deeply wronged, cheated, humiliated, betrayed, exploited, trea-
ted unfairly, discriminated against, and so on. The mistreatment at the
hands of the other is felt to be unforgivable. An apology is forever expected
by each, but never offered by either. Nothing is more important to the inter-
nal saboteur (the rejected self) than coercing the rejecting object into recog-
nizing the incalculable pain that he or she has caused.
From the point of view of the rejecting object (the split-off aspect of self
thoroughly identified with the rejecting mother), the experience of this form
of pathological love involves the conviction that the internal saboteur is
greedy, insatiable, thin-skinned, ungrateful, unwilling to be reasonable,
unable to let go of a grudge, and so on. But despite the burdensomeness of
the ceaseless complaining and self-righteous outrage of the internal saboteur,
the rejecting object is both unwilling and unable to give up the relationship,
i.e. to extricate itself from the mutual pathological dependence. The life, the
determination, the very reason for being of the rejecting object (as a part of
the self) is derived from its tie to the internal saboteur. The rejecting object

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110 T. H. Ogden

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.

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Why read Fairbairn? 111

‘‘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.

Bonds of contempt (the relationship of the internal saboteur to

the libidinal ego and the exciting object)
For me, one of Fairbairn’s most original and most significant contributions
to psychoanalysis is the understanding of human nature that emerges from
his conception of the relationship between the internal saboteur and the
libidinal ego, and between the internal saboteur and the exciting object. The
internal saboteur, filled with self-hatred for its own ‘‘dependence dictated by
… [infantile] need’’ (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 115), turns on the libidinal ego, and,
in so doing, turns on itself at one removed (since every internal object –
every endopsychic structure – is a subdivision of a subject who is one per-
son). The internal saboteur disdainfully, contemptuously attacks the libidinal
ego as a pathetic wretch, a sap, a sucker for the way it continually humili-
ates itself in begging for the love of the exciting object: ‘You [the libidinal
ego] never learn your lesson. You get kicked in the face [by the exciting
object] and drag yourself to your feet as if nothing has happened only to get
kicked and knocked down again. How can you be so stupid as not to see
what is plain as day? She [the exciting object] toys with you, leads you on,
and then dumps you every time. And yet you keep going back for more.
You disgust me.’
It seems to me that from this perspective – the perspective of the internal
saboteur – we are better able to understand the sense in which Fairbairn
uses the term libidinal ego to name the aspect of self that is tied by bonds
of addictive love to the exciting object. Libido, in this context, and in the
internal object world in general, is synonymous with narcissistic libido (nar-
cissistic love). All internal objects (more accurately, internal subjects) are
split-off parts of the central ego ⁄ self, and therefore the relationships among
them are exclusively relationships with oneself. Thus, the libidinal ego is
‘loving,’ but only loving of itself (in the form of the exciting object).
Closely tied to the attack of the internal saboteur on the libidinal ego is
the attack of the internal saboteur on the object of that narcissistic love, the

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112 T. H. Ogden

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.

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Why read Fairbairn? 113

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.

The relationship of the central ego to internal and external

objects
Before ending the discussion of the emotional life of internal objects ⁄ endop-
sychic structures, I will comment very briefly on Fairbairn’s concept of the
central ego. The central ego is the aspect of the psyche that Fairbairn least
fleshes out. What Fairbairn (1944) does say is that the central ego is an end-
opsychic structure capable of thinking, feeling, responding, and so on. It
constitutes the original healthy self of the newborn infant. From the outset,
the central ego of the infant is capable of rudimentary self-object differentia-
tion and of operating on the basis of the reality principle. But in response
to a traumatizing experience with a mother whom the infant experiences as
both loving and accepting of his love, and unloving and rejecting of his
love, the infant splits off parts of the central ego and represses them in
the form of the internal object relationships that I have described. Conse-
quently, the central ego retains its original health, but is significantly
depleted by the process of splitting off and ‘sending into exile’ (repressing)
parts of itself.
The central ego is the only part of the self that is able to engage in, and
learn from, experience with external objects. Change in the unconscious
internal object world is always mediated by the central ego (which some-
times acts in concert with external objects such as the analyst). Internal
objects interact with the external world only in the form of narcissistic
object relationships, that is, externalizations of internal object relationships
(which are necessarily narcissistic in nature). The central ego includes no
dynamically repressed (unsatisfactory) internal object relationships; rather,
the central ego consists exclusively of good enough (as opposed to idealized)
object relationships such as identifications with people whom one has loved
and by whom one has felt loved, recognized and accepted. Such identifica-
tions underlie feelings that include a sense of internal security, as well as
background feelings of solidity and integrity.

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114 T. H. Ogden

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

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Why read Fairbairn? 115

not want a romantic relationship with him. He became increasingly desper-

ate, angry and suicidal. From the outset of the analytic work, and frequently
thereafter, the patient told me that he did not know why I ‘tolerated’ him.
In our sessions, Mr. C would howl in pain as he spoke of the ‘unfairness’
of Ms. Z’s rejection of him. When upset, particularly when crying, the
patient would lose muscular control of his mouth, which made it very diffi-
cult for him to speak. Frothy saliva gathered at the sides of his mouth and
mucous dripped from his nose while tears ran down his cheeks. Being with
Mr. C at these times was heartbreaking. I have only rarely felt in such an
immediate, physical way that I was the mother of a baby in distress. Mr. C
seemed to want me to help him present himself to Ms. Z in a way that
would not frighten her and would help her understand how much he loved
her and how much she loved him (if she would only admit it to herself). It
was impossible not to hear in the patient’s ‘plan’ a wish that I transform
Ms. Z (and, unconsciously, his mother and the aspect of me that only ‘toler-
ated’ him) into people who were genuinely able to love him, accept him and
value his love.
In retrospect, I believe that it was very important to the analytic experi-
ence that Mr. C experience for himself over a period of years the reality that
I was not repulsed by him even when he bellowed in pain and could not
control the release of tears, nasal mucous and saliva. It must have been
apparent to Mr. C, though I never put it into words, that I loved him as
I would one day love my own children in their infancy. For years, the
patient had been too ashamed to tell me about some of the ways his mother
had humiliated him as a child, for example, by repeatedly calling him ‘a
repulsive, slobbering monster.’ He only gradually entrusted me with these
deeply shamed aspects of himself.
I viewed Mr. C’s accounts of his humiliating mother as a description not
only of his external object mother, but, as importantly, a description of an
aspect of himself that viewed himself as an object of contempt and which
enlisted others (most prominently, Ms. Z) to humiliate him. A humiliating
connection with Ms. Z was unconsciously felt to be far better than no con-
nection at all.
Several years into the work, Mr. C told me a dream: ‘‘Not much hap-
pened in the dream. I was myself, with my cerebral palsy, washing my car and
enjoying listening to music on the car radio that I had turned up loud.’’ The
dream was striking in a number of ways. It was the first time, in telling me
a dream, that Mr. C specifically mentioned his cerebral palsy. Moreover, the
way that he put it – ‘‘I was myself with my cerebral palsy’’ – conveyed a
depth of recognition and an acceptance of himself that I had never before
heard from him. How better could he have expressed a particular type of
change in his relationship to himself – a psychological change that involved
a loving self-recognition that contributed to freeing him from the need to
perpetually attempt to wring love and acceptance from those internal and
external objects who were least inclined to, or incapable of, loving him? In
the dream, he was able to be a mother who took pleasure in bathing her
baby (his car) while listening to and enjoying the music that was coming

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116 T. H. Ogden

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

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Why read Fairbairn? 117

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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118 T. H. Ogden
bambino). (2) l’idea che gli sforzi incessanti del bambino di trasformare il rapporto interiorizzato con la
madre anaffettiva in un rapporto di amore – rovesciando in tal modo l’effetto del suo presunto ‘amore
tossico’ sulla madre – sia la motivazione principale e struttura portante degli oggetti interni. (3) L’idea
che gli attacchi diretti a s stessi per il modo in cui si ama, per quanto autodistruttivi siano, contengano
un barlume di consapevolezza dell’odio per se stessi e della vergogna provocata dai propri continui e
futili tentativi di cambiarsi (o di cambiare l’oggetto che rifiuta) in una persona diversa. Mediante il suo
lavoro clinico, l’autore illustra il modo in cui si serve della sua comprensione della ‘vita emotiva’ degli
oggetti interni per facilitare la crescita psicologica del paziente.

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