Object Relations Theory
“Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The reader will be able to:
List the principles common to all object relations theories.
Define the major theorists’ views of human motivation and drives.
Define the major theorists’ views of the nature and origin of the ego, id, and superego.
Sigmund Freud’s drive psychology, like any revolutionary theory, raised as many issues as it explained. Perhaps its biggest shortcoming was that it remained a one-organism psychology. The “objects” in Freud’s world were essentially interchangeable. If the parent did not overly neglect or traumatize the infant, he or she would mature according to plan. And since the clinical practice driven by the theory dealt with such disorders as compulsions, phobias, and hysterical conversions, the explanations were mostly sufficient.
The ego psychologists added texture to the model by describing in more detail the intricacies of the structure ego and the
elements of development. They succeeded in beginning to build a general psychology that could explain normal as well as pathological development. In doing so, they accomplished two things. First, they were forced to look more carefully at the particular interpersonal environments of patients and normal children, and discovered that caregivers and others were not faceless, but made specific contributions. Second, because of the clinical success of their theories, they brought patients with problems not reducible to Oedipal conflicts into psychoanalysis and began to glimpse the pre-Oedipal nature of some psychopathology and the interpersonal sources of much psychic distress. These developments forced theorists to think more precisely about the role of others in the development of the human mind and in the genesis of psychopathology.
elements of development. They succeeded in beginning to build a general psychology that could explain normal as well as pathological development. In doing so, they accomplished two things. First, they were forced to look more carefully at the particular interpersonal environments of patients and normal children, and discovered that caregivers and others were not faceless, but made specific contributions. Second, because of the clinical success of their theories, they brought patients with problems not reducible to Oedipal conflicts into psychoanalysis and began to glimpse the pre-Oedipal nature of some psychopathology and the interpersonal sources of much psychic distress. These developments forced theorists to think more precisely about the role of others in the development of the human mind and in the genesis of psychopathology.
The thinkers of the interpersonal school made forays in these directions, but none attracted the critical mass of followers to develop any momentum. Such a nucleus did emerge (primarily in Great Britain) in the 1920s and 1930s and gained both traction and persistence as the object relations school of psychoanalytic theory. Because they were reworking many Freudian ideas, they had to retain his vocabulary and a nominal loyalty to drive theory. Each created his or her own language and focused on the specifics of his or her ideas that differentiated them from the rest. Thus we know these theorists today mostly by their disparities. It is important first to emphasize what is held in common by the object relations theorists before specifying their distinctions.
At its core, each theory maintains that people develop by interacting with real people in their environments, and they develop internal worlds that contain representations of these experiences. These representations shape how infants and children develop, and they shape how adults anticipate and perceive the interpersonal events in their worlds. The nature of these relationships profoundly affects the structures of id, ego, and superego. These experiences are recreated in the transference situation, where they can be analyzed and altered. (See Table 5-1.)
The differences among the object relations theories include:
The extent to which they differ with Freud’s drive/structure model
Their definitions of critical developmental issues and events
Their views of human motivation
TABLE 5-1 Principles Common to Object Relations Theories | ||||||||
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The theorists who best represent the different approaches to these differences are Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, W.R.D. Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, and Otto Kernberg.
MELANIE KLEIN: AGGRESSION AND “PHANTASY”
From an epistemological perspective, Melanie Klein (1882-1960) offered a distinct contribution to psychoanalysis. Untrained as a scientist or philosopher, she drew conclusions based not on the recollections of neurotic adults, but on direct observations of children at play and in analysis. Since children could not give words to the abstractions underlying their behavior, she was forced to speculate about their meaning. The theories she devised, rich in imagery and passion, added new depth particularly to considerations of fantasy and aggression. Study of Klein is complicated by the evolution of her ideas over time. For our purposes, we will outline the latest versions of her theories, together with those elements of earlier versions that were never rescinded.
For Sigmund Freud, drives existed by themselves; the entities to which they attached themselves became objects by definition. Klein could not accept this model and held that drives
are inherently object-directed. Even an infant cannot experience libido without a libidinal object. She soon came to find aggression to be a more influential force than libido in childhood development. Both aggression and libido, in her view, are bound to specific objects. Further, emotions are not neurotic manifestations of drive impulses, they are inherent features of the drives themselves: libido is loving; aggression is hateful.
are inherently object-directed. Even an infant cannot experience libido without a libidinal object. She soon came to find aggression to be a more influential force than libido in childhood development. Both aggression and libido, in her view, are bound to specific objects. Further, emotions are not neurotic manifestations of drive impulses, they are inherent features of the drives themselves: libido is loving; aggression is hateful.
Aggression for Klein was manifest in the child’s dominant aim to possess and control, and to ultimately destroy the objects in his or her environment. Where Freud had formulated the Oedipal conflict as one of libidinal desire for a prohibited object, Klein saw it as a struggle for power, possession, and destruction. As in the Freudian version, a result of the struggle is the fear of retaliation. For Freud, it was jealous reprisal for possession of the mother; for Klein, angry retribution by the assaulted father. Even further, because Klein saw object-directed aggression at work from birth on, she postulated the existence of a primitive Oedipal complex even in infancy.
Klein’s most substantial contribution may have been her new formulation of fantasy. In drive psychology, fantasy was an adaptive substitute for something undesirable in the real environment. In ego psychology, it was a modality for organizing perceptions. Klein instead viewed it as the singular substrate of all mental processes. She defined an inborn, unconscious function, whose content and images are phylogenetically inherited. Fantasy could be seen as the mental representation of drive instinct. Fantasy, Klein maintained, was primary, and the infant was born with a densely populated object world. Perceptions of real persons were distorted to fit the templates of this inner world.
Klein outlined the stages of development into what she called “positions,” defining constellations of phantasy and emotion.
The paranoid position (later called the paranoid-schizoid position) occupies the first 3 months of life. The infant organizes phantasies and experiences into good and bad objects. The homogeneity of these objects leaves the child vulnerable to abandonment or destruction, hence the paranoia.
By the second quarter of the first year, the child enters the depressive position. Klein posits that the child at this stage begins to realize that the good and bad mother are the same person, but still believes in the destructive power of his or
her own aggressive impulses. As a result, the child is fearful of the effects of his or her hostile wishes on the object of libidinal attachment.
MS. GRAY directed aggressive impulses toward her mother for failing to resist and deflect her father’s cruelty. Worried that this aggression hurt her mother and the internalized representation of her mother, she is left with a predisposition to depressed feelings. Unable to tolerate the internal consequences of this hostility, she directs it at multiple external objects, which play symbolic roles in her phantasy world.The depressive position is never fully resolved, and psychological life is a continuing pursuit of reparation for the harm done. The entire Oedipal complex is now a vehicle for undoing the effects of depressive anxiety. In less fortunate individuals, the picture is even more complicated as unresolved remnants of the paranoid position restrict the available range of mental operations.
Since Klein’s link between drives and objects was so fundamental, it required a reformulation of the mental structures that housed them. Ego was no longer a developmental outgrowth of the conflict between aggression and libido within the id. Instead, ego was a medium for love and connection; id, for hate and destruction. Both, therefore, had to be present from birth. For Freud, the central conflict was between drive and reality. For Klein it was a war between love and hate.
MARGARET MAHLER: SEPARATION AND INDIVIDUATION
Margaret Mahler (1897-1985) was a pediatrician before becoming a psychoanalyst. Like Klein, she formed her hypotheses with direct observations of children. Her work addressed the question of the sources of human individuality. She was attracted to Hartmann’s notions of adaptation and extended them to describe adaptation to the interpersonal, human environment.
Mahler outlined phases of human psychological development:
Normal autism, occupying just the first few weeks of life, is focused on satisfying needs and reducing discomfort or
tension. The infant uses hallucinations to gratify his or her wishes until they are fulfilled in actuality; reality testing is nonexistent.
The normal symbiotic phase lasts from about the ages of 4 weeks to 4 months. The developing body becomes more aware of external stimuli. The infant is aware of the mother, but identifies her as a single unit with himself or herself. Experiences are classified as either good or bad, and memory traces begin to get laid down consistent with those divisions.
Separation-individuation characterizes the remainder of human psychological development. Separation is the emergence of the child from symbiotic unity; individuation is the acquisition of personal characteristics. This large phase is divided into 4 subphases:
Differentiation—From ages 5 to 10 months, the child perceives himself or herself as distinct from mother and eventually separates mother from others.Related posts:
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