The World of Internal Object Relations
Fairbairn built his own object relations theory out of conceptual materials supplied by Melanie Klein, particularly her notions of internal objects and internalized object relations. Yet his use of these terms and his vision of mind were very different from hers. For Klein, internal objects were fantasied presences that were an accompaniment to all experience. In the primitive thinking of the child and the always primitive unconscious thought of the adult, projective and introjective fantasies based on infantile experiences of nursing, defecating, and so on perpetually generated fantasies of good and bad internal objects, loving and hating, nurturing and destroying. Internal objects for Klein were a natural and inevitable feature of mental life; internalized object relations were the primary forms of thought and experience.
For Fairbairn, healthy parenting resulted in a child with an outward orientation, directed toward real people, who would provide real contact and exchange. Internal objects of the kind Klein described were understood by Fairbairn to result from inadequate parenting. If the child's dependency needs are not met, if the affirmative interactions sought by the child are not provided, a pathological turning away from external reality, from actual exchange with others, takes place and fantasied, private presences (internal objects) are established, to whom one maintains a fantasied connection (internal object relations). For Fairbairn, internal objects are not (as for Klein) essential and inevitable accompaniments of all experience, but rather compensatory substitutes for the real thing, actual people in the interpersonal world.
Fairbairn's account of the processes through which internal object relations develop was sketchy and incomplete, but some of his concepts have rich clinical applications. He envisioned the child with largely unavailable parents as differentiating between the responsive aspects of the parents (the good object) and the unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object). Because the child, in his object-seeking, cannot reach the unresponsive aspects of the parents in actuality, he internalizes them and fantasizes those features of the parents as now being inside of him, part of him.
This phenomenon can be seen at work in the case of Charles, a middle-aged man seeking analysis for episodic depressions and withdrawals. His father was caring but hard, remote, and extremely demanding. His mother was a very competent and available, happy-go-lucky homemaker, a committed optimist, always bright and cheery--her nickname was Sunny. Charles discovered in analysis that although he felt his mother was physically accessible, he never felt he could connect with her emotionally, that he was denied access to what she was really feeling about anything. He sensed an unexplained sadness about her which she never spoke of. He began to remember times when he would hear her crying behind her locked bedroom door; she would soon emerge, her sunny smile restored. He also recalled times when he would wake during the night at the sound of his father softly playing plaintive ballads on his harmonica in the dark of the living room. Charles would creep downstairs and, unobserved, listen quietly in the dark, secretly sharing these rare moments, rich in feeling, with his father. Charles's personality was shaped along lines similar to those of his parents; he was very active, responsible, and optimistic. Through the analysis, he began to understand his episodic depressions, atypical periods of total futility and despair, as precious links to the emotional centers of his parents' lives that he did not have access to through actual, ongoing interactions with them. Surprisingly, he felt most connected to them, at one with them, when he was depressed. When Charles felt genuinely happy and successful, he felt cut off from them. A recurrent dream image emerged during the analysis: a jellyfish man, collapsed, sad, helpless and spineless. This image seemed to capture Charles's depressive tie to his parents, a sadness with no bones, no structure, because the mournful connections to their emotionality were split off and encapsulated, not spoken about, not developed. In his depressions were preserved, like fragile icons from an archaic past, unintegrated fragments of loving ties.www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
