Object Relations

Question 1

Which theorist is most well-known for object relations?

Answer 1

Melanie Klein

Question 2

What are the two positions that each infant goes through? (Klein, 1926, 1940, 1948)

Answer 2

• paranoid-schizoid

- depressive

Question 3

Summarize the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1926, 1940, 1948)

Answer 3

• consists of the first six months of life
• the infant is not able to distinguish between the good and bad aspects of the mother (good and bad breast) and so sees the mother as two separate objects
• characterized by part object relations, ego splits experiences as all good or all bad (good breast and bad breast cannot be integrated into a “whole” mom), the infant projects bad feelings and this hated, frustrated object quickly becomes persecutory in revenge for infant’s feelings, from the infant’s perspective, leads to a paranoid anxiety about annihilation

Question 4

Summarize the depressive position (Klein, 1926, 1940, 1948)

Answer 4

-When the child realizes that he had been aiming his aggression towards the bad breast at his whole mother, he feels tremendous fear of annihilation and fears the mother will retaliate against him.
-The task during the depressive position (6 months on) is to be able to integrate the good and bad aspects of the mother. The child must then experience the mother’s love in a way that he sees that his mother forgives him for the tremendous rage he believes he had been aiming towards her.
-Klein would say that if mothers were unable to provide this type of reassurance, then the person may be prone to depressive dynamics later in life.
Infant is able to experience others as whole beings with both good and bad qualities and starts to repair good and bad split. Process continues throughout lifetime. evident when the splitting and part objects are succeeded by the capacity to integrate, infant is able to experience the other as a whole, infant becomes aware of separateness of the moms, allows guilt to arise in response to the continuing love and attention by caretaker, lends to a shift from fear of destroying others- these feelings continue until the child becomes fully assured of the mother’s love for them, which is accomplished thru adequate responsiveness to their needs (unconditional love); if this is failed, the individual will be vulnerable to returning to the depressive position in adulthood, marked by feelings of helplessness, sadness, guilt, and regret

Question 5

How would Klein describe depression (Klein, 1926, 1940, 1948)

Answer 5

result of problematic mother-child relationships during 1st year of life, as opposed to a series of traumatic relationships
-children who are not met with sufficient love are always predisposed to depressive feelings of loss, sorrow, and guilt

Question 6

Other aspects to Klein’s theory (Klein, 1926, 1940, 1948)

Answer 6

• infant reacts to frustration with rage and sadistic features
• child feels helpless as weak ego cannot control these feelings, leads to helplessness
• weak ego induces fears of being exterminated or destroyed by impulses and objects

Question 7

Klein’s perspective regarding schizophrenia (Klein, 1926, 1940, 1948)

Answer 7

-failure to develop secure attachment during symbiosis subphases (preverbal, pre-rapprochement)
-human interaction is therefore intolerable and fraught with extreme anxiety
-use defenses such as withdrawal to cope with the anxiety from human interaction
-schizoid character associated with schizophrenia
-treatment should focus on remedying the attachment dysfunctions by establishing treatment relationship
-regarded potential schizophrenics as endowed with strong sadistic and envious impulses that rendered infant prone to intense paranoid anxiety and therefore to overuse
 withdrawal
 splitting
 projective identification
-such infants remain fixated at the paranoid position, to which they regress in the face of later stress after further developing thru adolescence
-interpersonal theories based on failure to develop positive relationships during childhood

Question 8

Describe the basics of Sullivan’s interpersonal theory (Sullivan, 1938)

Answer 8

• anxiety drives pathology
• in the face of anxiety, the self-system security operations lead to the creation of fantasized defensive self-other constelations

Question 9

Anxiety in interpersonal situations has 3 states (Sullivan, 1938)

Answer 9

• good me (low anxiety)
• bad me (high anxiety)
• not me (intolerable anxiety)

Question 10

Anxiety leads to the organization of defensive structures, known as self-systems which function to maximize satisfaction and minimize anxiety through the use of security operations like (Sullivan, 1938)

Answer 10

• selective attention
• sublimination
• projection

Question 11

More basics on Sullivan’s (1938) theory

Answer 11

• schizophrenia begins with another who is more anxious than normal and imparts this tension to the child as excessive, not me experiences, results in cumulative experiential traumas during development
• child’s self-system overcompensates with excessive dissociation and warps own further development
• adolescent surge of new sexual needs assault the compromised self system and the defensive wall of selective attention breaks down, not me anxiety returns and panic ensues
• subsequent state of terror is characterized by the eruption into conscious awareness of developmentally primitive states of mind, with collapse of integrated self-systems into the unpleasant state of nothingness
• individuals primary motivations at the point are to avoid not-me anxiety and to recognize the self in order to reestablish meaning and become human again
• this reorganization is schizophrenia
• schizophrenia is an adaptive strategy for avoiding fragmentation and chaos and for reconstructing a self with human identity, meaning, and purpose

Question 12

Basics of Fairbairn’s theory (19,41, 1944, 1946, 1952)

Answer 12

• Built on Klein
• The FIRST deficit theory within psychoanalysis
• posited that when children have imperfect relationships with their caregivers (real people are deemed “primary” or “natural objects”) in real life (which is inevitable), they will form internalized object representations of these primary objects.
• These internal representations then become tied to a portion of the ego and these parts of the ego become “split off” from the rest of the ego.
• Because libido is not pleasure-seeking but object-seeking, relationships with others are the infant’s primary goal in life.
• Because babies cannot be around their mothers every single second and cannot experience their mothers as perfect, they will begin forming internal objects to represent the parts of the mother that they cannot get in real life.
• The more disturbed a person’s relationships are in real life, the more internal objects they will have.

Question 13

The idea of the mother becomes torn into 3 aspects in the infant’s internal representations (Fairbairn)

Answer 13

• gratifying object – aspects of the mother become tied to the central ego, and the central ego is the only portion that remains for the person to use in developing real relationships with real people
• enticing object - the aspects of the mother that signaled some hope but did not really provide, and these internal objects become tied to the libidinal ego
• rejecting object - represents the parts of the mother that were outright ungratifying, and these objects become tied to the anti-libidinal ego

Question 14

Fairbairn suggested that a person with a great deal of internal objects tied to libidinal and anti-libidinal egos will be ________

Answer 14

much less capable of forming real fulfilling relationship, and psychopathology can ensue

Question 15

Fairbairn also posited that people move through the phases of

Answer 15

• infantile dependence
• a transitional phase
• and then mature interdependence

Question 16

Describe Fairbairn’s transitional phase

Answer 16

the person must give up all of their internal objects and must also learn to accept that they are a separate and individuated person from the mother and others. However, in order to do this, the person must believe that other primary objects are actually available and will provide love. Some people do not fully believe this, and the thought of giving up their internal objects is too anxiety-provoking because it means they would be utterly alone.

Question 17

How does Faibairn describe the repetition compulsion differently than Freud?

Answer 17

Freud (1920) had stated that the repetition compulsion operated beyond the pleasure principle and was a lingering manifestation of the death instinct. Fairbairn believed that the repetition compulsion was a person’s attempt to re-master past relationships that had gone poorly. It could also be a result of a person recreating old, bad relationships because these were the type of relationships they had with their parents and therefore the type of internalized object relations they now have.

Question 18

Fairbairn’s perspective of depression

Answer 18

• Lack of internalization of positive object relations in childhood leads to negative affective states (depression) in adulthood
• Child compensates by substituting fantasized internal objects rather than real external orientation
• Child feels hate is his fault
• The person may play out the dramas of her past (repetition) in present and may even seek similar objects in order to master old bad relationships or because old bad relationships are familiar and provide some pleasure
• Person likely believes it was their fault that they drove the love object away, thru their neediness or hate, this happens if the person experiences a loss at the late oral incorporative phase
• Person requires a transitional phase to learn to love without destroying by hate

Question 19

Fairbairn’s perspective of anxiety

Answer 19

• dangerous object ties that can threaten one’s maintained sense of self and emerge into consciousness,
• the person may play out the drama of her past (repetition) in present relationships to try to master them or because they are comfortable/provide some sort of pleasure
• in terms of anxiety, individuals who internalize punitive and wrathful objects or neglectful objects who failed to nurture and love, will expect this in future relationships, this causes anxiety

Question 20

Basics of Winnicott’s theory (1949, 1951, 1958, 1960, 1965, 1969, 1971)

Answer 20

• Believed that an infant needed to experience good-enough mothering in order to develop healthy object relations and avoid later pathology.
• A mother experiences primary maternal preoccupation, in which her needs are temporarily placed on hold and she seeks only to meet the needs of her child.
• The mother provides a holding environment for the child in which she brings the world to him.
• During the first few months of life, the mother is in a state of primary maternal preoccupation, and the baby himself does not recognize that he is a separate being from the mother.
• This state of preoccupation allows the mother to be perfectly responsive to the infant’s needs, and it allows the infant to believe that he is conjuring up mother’s responsiveness in his own mind. For example, when the baby is hungry and the mother provides the breast, the infant believes he has conjured it in his own mind, creating the feeling in him of hallucinatory omnipotence.
• The child experiences subjective omnipotence. When he is hungry, mother’s breast appears to feed him. When he is soiled, suddenly he is cleaned. The infant comes to believe that he/she is responsible for this and, thus, all-powerful.
• With any parenting, there are times in which the child’s needs cannot be immediately met and the child must wait. Slowly, the child enters objective reality and realizes he is not the all-powerful being once thought to be. If the child is forced into objective reality too soon, it hinders his/her development. The child’s true self is stunted. Rather, the child develops a false self to meet the demands of the environment.

Question 21

Winnicott and the development of the false self

Answer 21

• Winnicott believed that infants needed to temporarily experience this form of omnipotence, and then needed to be gradually let down by the mother so that they could learn that they were separate objects who did not have control over others.
• The baby also needs to be left alone when he is in his state of “going-on being” which means that he is not currently experiencing any needs that would need to be met by the mother.
• If the mother is not available when the mother needs him, or if she intrudes upon him when he is in his state of going-on being, this is perceived by the infant as impingement.
• Winnicott believed that humans are in a constant struggle between wanting contact with others and not wanting to be engulfed by them. Sometimes people want alone time without fearing that they will be permanently isolated from others.
• If the mother impinges upon the baby during his quiescent state or does not allow him to form hallucinatory omnipotence during early life, then the infant will create more of a false self.
• The false self consists of the aspects of the self that are renounced out of fear that needs won’t be taken care of, and the false self instead becomes compliant to others.
• Person has taken on a false self to appease others and the external world who impinge upon their autonomous strivings, anything good for the self results in guilt and displeasure

Question 22

Use the example of Jane with Winnicott’s theory

Answer 22

Jane stated that she moved to a distant city to get away from her mother. She felt like her mother had a high need for attention when Jane was growing up. These facts provide evidence that Jane’s mother likely impinged upon her while she was growing up, which would have caused Jane to form more of a false self. It may have also caused Jane to have difficulties with boundaries in relationships with others, and to feel insecure that others would leave her, because she lacked the type of good-enough mothering that would have taught her that her needs would be met when she genuinely needed them to be met, and also that she would not be intruded upon when she genuinely wanted to be alone.

Question 23

Winnicott and depression

Answer 23

• Failures in good enough mothering and lack of adequate holding environment lead to depressive characteristics
• Person has taken on a false self to appease others and the external world who impinge upon their autonomous strivings, anything good for the self results in guilt and displeasure

Question 24

Winnicott and anxiety

Answer 24

• chronic failure of nurturing causes radical split in the self between genuine strivings (true self) and complaint self (false self) from a history of premature, forced necessity for dealing with the external world
• Anxious adults are seen as in search of crucial, missing experiences
• Spontaneous excitement is met with fear and anxiety, rather than thru responsive adaptation and actualization
• failures in good enough mothering and lack of holding environment lead to dysfunction
• chronic natural failure forces the child to choose a false self instead of a true self, anxiety may be the result of the patient searching for missing experiences they were not afforded during childhood
• the false self appeases others but forecloses one’s own needs
• in the case of sandy, her mother wasn’t good enough and didn’t provide an adequate holding environment, mother impinged upon Sandy’s autonomous strivings, causing sandy to develop a false self which seeks to constantly appease a cold and rejecting mother, therefore sandy was left with an undeveloped true self, thus seeking anything good for the self feels unacceptable, for sandy this was reinforced by the event when she began college and then her grandmother died, similarly leaving home causes feelings of panic

Question 25

Winnicott and schizophrenia

Answer 25

• maternal absence or withdrawal during the paranoid-schizoid position
• ego’s way of perpetuating old ties and hopes represented by internal objects
• recreating of the past in the current
• early oral incorporative stage
• schizophrenia seen as a continuum of the schizoid pathology, the only difference being in degree, it is the most severe end of the spectrum with the schizophrenic patient withdrawing love investment to such an extent that emotional contact with others and with external reality is renounced