Review Essay
This is a slightly revised version of a review-essay published in the Can. J. Psychoanal./Rev. Can. Psychanal., 4, 2 (Winter 1996): 343-353.
Fairbairn and the Origins of Object Relations. Edited by James S. Grotstein and Donald B. Rinsley.
New York & London :
The Guilford
Press, 1994. 350 pp. ISBN 0-89862-135-6. Hardcover.
Approx. $56.00 Canadian. Published in Great Britain by Free Association
Books.
Grotstein and Rinsley have performed a valuable service for
the psychoanalytic community by bringing together these seventeen papers,
together with an epilogue and three useful appendices (one listing Fairbairn's
main papers; another listing contributions related to Fairbairn's work; and one
outlining Fairbairn's concepts and terminology). Although nine of the
papers, including Fairbairn's own synopsis of his theory and papers by
Sutherland, Kernberg, Mitchell, Ogden, Hughes, Rinsley, Padel and Robbins, and
two of the appendices, have previously been published, it is useful nevertheless
to have the opportunity to read such a range of interpretations and critiques
of Fairbairn's work, offered from diverse theoretical and clinical viewpoints,
in relation to one another.
In the area of theory, previously unpublished essays
include: Grotstein and Rinsley's "Introduction"; Grotstein's
"Notes on Fairbairn's Metapsychology"; Rubens' "Fairbairn's
Structural Theory"; Grotstein's "Endopsychic Structure and the
Cartography of the Internal World"; and Modell's "Fairbairn's
Structural Theory and the Communication of Affects". In the area of
clinical formulations, previously unpublished papers include: Symington's
"The Tradition of Fairbairn"; Armstrong-Perlman's "The
Allure of the Bad Object"; and Hamilton 's
"Resistance to the Release of the Bad Object in the Psychotherapy of a
Refugee." I personally found the latter two clinical papers most
interesting in that they provide a concrete view of how Fairbairnian theory
actually operates in clinical practice. Although previously published,
Michael Robbins' essay, "A Fairbairnian Object Relations Perspective on
Self Psychology" opens up a view of Fairbairn as both a precursor of the
psychology of the self and as a theorist from whom self psychology may
well have a good deal still to learn.
Although, according to the dustcover, "Fairbairn has
had a profound influence in almost every area of contemporary theory and
practice," it is my impression that, prior to the W.R.D. Fairbairn
Centennial Conference in Edinburgh in 1989, at which several of the papers in
this collection were first presented, extended and detailed analyses and
applications of Fairbairn's specific model of the mind--as distinct from
appreciation of his more general notions--were few and far between. This
relative neglect probably has several explanations. Certainly, the blunt
manner in which he criticized and rejected fundamental Freudian concepts, such
as that of the id, must have played a part; as may his somewhat undialectical
assertion that libido is object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking. Why
could it not be both?
Fairbairn's ideas were almost as difficult for Kleinians to
accept as for Freudians. Although he shared Kleins's rejection of Freud's
concept of primary narcissism as a phase of undifferentiation at the beginning,
positing instead a primitive ego engaged in relations with objects from the
outset, Fairbairn's conception of this original ego was very different from
Klein's. For the latter, the archaic ego was, depending upon your
interpretation of her somewhat ambiguous texts, either split from the beginning
due to the opposing forces of Eros and Thanatos, or comes to be split almost
immediately due to the infant's interpretation of any and all frustration and
pain as a persecutory attack by an all-bad (part-)object and its generation in
phantasy of an all-good (part-)object as a refuge from such persecution.
But, for Fairbairn, at the outset there exists a "whole, pristine, unitary
ego" that only splits as a consequence of environmental failure.
Fairbairn
believed that an internal phantasy world is a pathological development. Several of the authors in this collection are quite
critical of this concept, flying as it does in the face of a widespread psychoanalytic consensus that
psychic development proceeds through processes of introjection and
identification which lead to the build-up of psychic structure.
Certainly, the Kleinians, who see psychic reality as a tissue of phantasy,
would have difficulty with Fairbairn's view of phantasy as pathology and his
notion that a healthy mind would be purged of this internal phantasmagoria and,
moving out of the pathological internal world, would relate directly in the
here and now to external objects in the real world. Many psychoanalysts
would no doubt find this view both naive and offensive in its apparent lack of
any appreciation of phantasy and transitional modes of relating in creativity.
Although at first I shared this attitude, I have lately
come to find Fairbairn's thinking in this area rather interesting--provided one
distinquishes between the defensive, schizoid uses of phantasy he deplores and
the healthy and creative uses of fantasy he appears to ignore.
Fairbairn's perspective addresses what has always seemed to me to be something
of a paradox in psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud the
"ego"--which in this context refers to the Ich or
self-representation rather than the ego of the structural theory of
id-ego-superego, a hypothetical control apparatus--is built up though identification with lost objects. Although in
"Mourning and Melancholia," Freud (1917) had seen the process whereby
the ego came to introject and identify itself with the lost object as a
pathological process central in what we now refer to as depression, six
years later, in "The Ego and the Id," he (Freud, 1923) had come to
the conclusion that such processes of introjection of and identification with
lost objects constitute the basis of normal ego development.
Following in Freud's footsteps, Erikson (1959) saw normal
"ego identity" as involving the synthesis of a vast range of
self-images stemming from multiple levels of development, together with
confirmation of this synthesis by social reality. More recently, Kernberg
(1976) wrote that "An authentic
self can come about only when diverse self-images have been organized into an
integrated self-concept ..." (p.121).
In the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition, the
"ego" or "self"--even the "authentic"
self--is seen as representational, that is, as composed of images.
Melanie Klein seems to have taken an essentially similar view. Although
she rejected the notion of primary narcissism and posited a primitive ego
engaged in archaic object relations from the outset, she nevertheless shared
Freud's view of the healthy ego as
composed of identification with an introjected, whole, repaired, good object.
But how can an "ego," a "self" or
"identity" based on identification with a composite of introjected
images be real, let alone authentic? How can this structure of images,
memories, identifications, phantasies and narratives--the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves--how can this amount in any real sense to a living,
authentic agent or essence? This is a question that has seldom been
raised in psychoanalytic quarters. Freud himself manifests a good deal of
ambivalence in this area. Having initially shown considerable suspicion
toward the ego, insisting that "The
unconscious is the true psychical reality" (Freud, 1900, p.613), in
his later ego psychology he appears to change his attitude toward the ego quite
substantially, treating it more and more as an authentic subject and
centre. Nevertheless, even after over twenty years of his developing ego
psychology, at the end of his career Freud (1940 [1938]) could write in his
unfinished "An Outline of Psycho-Analysis" that "The core of our
being, then, is formed by the obscure id..." (p. 197).
There are a few other voices in the history of
psychoanalysis. Hartmann (1939) suggested that, aside from all the images
of which it comes to be composed during its history of conflictual development,
the "ego" has from the beginning a number of innate apparatuses of
primary autonomy. Responsible for such functions as motility,
intelligence, language, perception, etc., these exist--together with those ego
functions which, although originating in psychic conflict, have subsequently
achieved secondary autonomy--in a "conflict-free" sphere of the
ego. Could these "apparatuses" provide a basis for
ego-functioning apart from all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?
Lacan (1977, ch. 1) distinguished between what he called the
"specular ego" (once again to be distinguished from the ego of
Freud's structural theory) and a somewhat more mysterious dimension of our
Being that he referred to as the "subject". The ego was formed in the "mirror
stage" (6 to 18 months) as a result of the infant's misidentification of
itself with its image in the (real or metaphorical) mirror. For Lacan,
the ego is a dead image; it is associated with the death drive and with anal
mastery and control. Like feces, it is a dead thing. In our
narcissism, we worship it. But it is merely an icon, an idol, and our
worship--our self-preoccupation--is a form of idolatry.
According to biblical definition, idolatry is the worship
of graven images. In the Lacanian view, narcissism amounts to a type of idolatry--in this case the worship of
the self-image. The more focused we are on the ego, the more the
living subject is relegated to the background, to the unconscious, from whence
it can only "speak" through gaps or cracks in the ego's totalitarian
control apparatus--that is, through the lapses known as Freudian slips, or
dreams, or symptoms. In this view, the living subject--like the living
God--may never be known, but only lived or realized. For to know is to
image or imagine--or to conceptualize and thus reduce to the confines of a
concept. At the very least it is evident that any self we know must
exclude the self that is knowing it at that moment.
As a social psychologist originally trained in the
so-called "symbolic interactionist" school of George Herbert Mead
(1934) in which the self is seen as containing an irreducible
subject-object duality, the Lacanian view of this split between the
"subject" and the "ego" has always made a good deal of
sense to me. For Mead, in addition to the "me" or self-image
that I derive reflexively by taking the role of the other and imagining how
that other views me--Charles Horton Cooley's (1902) "looking-glass
self"--there is what Mead called the "I" which, as the
subject/knower of the image in the mirror perpetually remains outside it.
The "I" is like the photographer who never himself gets into the
picture because he is always behind the camera taking the picture. While,
for Mead, the conceptual self or "me" is a social self, derived
essentially from others, the "I" is a non-conceptual, essentially
unimaginable subject with which Mead associates our unique individuality,
creativity and spontaneity. It is this unknown and essentially unknowable
knower that is largely missing from psychoanalytic theories of the ego or the
self--except for the work of Lacan and the few other adumbrations of the
concept mentioned above, including Fairbairn's much-disputed notion of a
"whole, pristine, unitary ego" at both the beginning of life and as
the goal of the psychoanalytic journey out of the internal phastasmagoria and
back to living, loving and working in reality.
Despite semantic appearances to the contrary, Fairbairn's
whole ego may parallel the Lacanian subject, and his split ego the Lacanian
specular ego. Both Lacan and Fairbairn wish to lead us out of
alienation--that is, out of captivity by a "false self" (Winnicott,
1960). What other psychoanalytic traditions accept as the normal build-up
of psychic structure through internalization processes, both Lacan and
Fairbairn reject as pathology. In their efforts to lead us out of the
"Maya"--the net of illusions--constituted by our internal,
representational worlds, both Lacan and Fairbairn move psychoanalysis in an
Eastern direction. In Buddhism, the "ego" has always been seen
as the source of human ignorance and consequent suffering.
Another conception shared by Lacan and Fairbairn is that of
the primal innocence of infancy.
For Lacan, the trouble doesn't really begin until, between 6 and 18 months, in
the so-called "mirror stage," the infant misidentifies itself with
its image in the (real or metaphorical) mirror. This constitutes a sort
of "fall," emancipation from which only becomes possible through
accession to "the Word": through language the "subject" may
be enabled to "speak" throught the gaps and cracks in the
"ego's" apparatus of control. Similarly, for Fairbairn, the
infant is whole and innocent until, due to environmental failure, it is confronted
with a bad object which it then internalizes in an ill- fated effort to control
it. All the rest of the splitting then follows.
Like Grotstein, I believe one of Fairbairn's greatest
contributions is this postulate of "infantile innocence and entitlement"
(p.5). Here he transcends both Freud's and Klein's views of "the
demonic infant" (p.9), in Freud's case demonically sexual and in Klein's
demonically omnipotent. Where I have difficulty, both with Fairbairn
himself and with Grotstein who finds elements of existentialism in Fairbairn,
is in the latter's, to me naive, idea that the "fall of man" is due
to environmental failure. Although Fairbairn tries to moderate his
romanticism by acknowledging that this fall is inevitable and that the resulting
endopsychic structure (and the schizoid
problem) is universal, his realism is, to my mind, merely
apparent. For he goes on to say that the reason the fall into internalization and splitting is inevitable is
because parental failure is inevitable.
At first glance, this sounds reasonable. But I do not
believe it really is. Notice that the fall is still being blamed on
parental failure, albeit that this "failure" is held to be
inevitable. The concept of failure only holds meaning relative to its
binary opposite, the concept of success. If success is genuinely believed
to be impossible, then it makes no sense to speak of failure (even while
asserting that such failure is inevitable). Notice what is not being
said. What is not said is that the fall would occur even if the
primary caretaking were perfect. Of course, the primary caretaking can
never be perfect, but to admit that the fall would occur even if it were would
entail admission that the fall is existential rather than environmentally caused. This would be to admit that to be human is
to fall into internalization, splitting, and a degree of schizoid alienation
from reality.
This admission of an existential dimension need not entail
any denial of the fact that environmental failure makes matters worse.
But it makes possible the distinction between a "basic" or
existential level of frustration that we encounter in the process of
psychological birth, and a "surplus" level of frustration due to
environmental failure. Here is where I think Lacan has succeeded where
Fairbairn failed: for Lacan understood
that the birth of the "ego"--i.e., the false, narcissistic self--is a
developmental necessity and inevitability, quite apart from any pathology
stemming from environmental failure and developmental derailment of various
types.
CARTOGRAPHY OF ENDOPSYCHIC STRUCTURE
As I suggested above, despite the widespread influence of
certain of Fairbairn's central ideas, his detailed model of endopsychic
structure (the split internal world consequent upon the fall) has seldom
received the attention it deserves. This, I think, is due to its sheer
complexity, among other factors. Because the model is so difficult to
hold in mind, beginning in the late 1970's I began to employ the following
charts as aids to teaching and elaborating upon Fairbairn's theory. Over
time, the original chart was modified, first to accommodate Guntrip's addition
to Fairbairn's model (the addition of the regressed ego--RE) and, subsequently,
to bring certain of Melanie Klein's key insights back into the picture (the
notion of an attacking object--AO--and a persecuted ego--PE). Here is the
original chart.
I. Fairbairn.
|
|
GOOD
|
BAD
|
BAD
|
|
PARENT
|
Ideal Object (IO)
|
Exciting Object (EO)
|
Rejecting
Object (RO)
|
|
CHILD
|
Central Ego (CE)
|
Libidinal Ego (LE)
|
Anti-Libidinal Ego
|
It is understood that the subject may at times identify
with any of the parent images and projectively identify any of the child images
into the object, or vice versa. The "honeymoon" phase of a
relationship or an analysis entails an attempt to retain the IO-CE relationship
by splitting off, repressing or projecting the bad self and object
images. Sooner or later the repressed returns and "heaven"
gives way to "hell." Naturally, this development is essential
in analysis, for only if the bad self and object images are
"released" into the analytic space can there be any hope of their
analysis and integration. (Note that the anti-libidinal ego does not seem
to fit logically into its allotted cell in the chart. This problem will
be addressed further on.)
II. Fairbairn + Guntrip.
Guntrip (1976) reports that he proposed and Fairbairn
accepted the positing of a final ego split characteristic of the deepest schizoid
conditions. Faced with despair arising from the repeated experience of
"heaven" going to "hell"--that is, with the impossibility
of maintaining "all-good" object relations and the inevitable swing
from idealization to devaluation and "all-bad" object
relations--certain individuals give up relating altogether and withdraw deep
into themselves (while maintaining, Guntrip believed, some slight hope for the
"rebirth" of the "true self" if and when favourable
conditions should be found). In the face of both the exciting and
rejecting objects (the two faces of the bad object), the regressed ego (RE)
retreats from object relating, resulting in a condition of schizoid
withdrawal. #1
|
|
GOOD
|
BAD
|
BAD
|
|
PARENT
|
Ideal Object (IO)
|
Exciting Object (EO)
|
Rejecting Object (RO)
|
|
CHILD
|
Central Ego (CE)
|
Libidinal Ego (LE)
|
Anti-Libidinal Ego
|
|
|
|
Regressed Ego (RE)
|
Regressed Ego (RE)
|
III. Fairbairn + Guntrip + Klein.
It gradually struck me that the bad object could not be
reduced to exciting and rejecting manifestations. In paranoid states we
see it operating as a persecutor. Therefore, I felt it to be essential to
bring Klein back onto the scene and to add, as one of the manifestations of the
bad object, an attacking object (AO) and, as one of the negative split
ego-states, a persecuted ego. The retreat of the regressed ego (RE) would
appear to be motivated by flight from persecutory attack, as well as by the
intolerable pain arising from tantalization (EO) and rejection (RO).
|
|
GOOD
|
BAD
|
BAD
|
BAD
|
|
PARENT
|
IO
|
EO
|
RO
|
Attacking Object ........ (AO)
|
|
CHILD
|
CE
|
LE
|
Anti-LE (?)
|
Persecuted Ego .........(PE)
|
|
|
|
RE
|
RE
|
RE
|
IV. A Final Revision.
Above, I mentioned that Fairbairn's anti-libidinal ego or
"internal saboteur" does not appear to fit logically into the cell to
which it is allocated in the chart. The anti-LE would not seem to be a
state of the child, but a state of the adult. Unlike the central ego
(CE), or the libidinal ego (LE), or the persecuted ego (PE), each of which
refer to experiential states of the child--i.e, states of idealizing and
compliant dependence, or of inflamed longing (lust, greed, and envy) or of
helpless persecution--the anti-LE refers to active persecution of the child,
not an experiential state of the child.
I therefore concluded that, in keeping with Fairbairn's own
descriptions of it, the anti-LE should be removed from the chart in that
it refers to the subject's identification with any or all of the manifestations
of the bad object and the enactment of the bad object's tormenting behaviour
toward the self. In other words, the anti-LE is essentially an
identification with the aggressor. Hence, the subject will at times
identify with the exciting object (EO) and cruelly tantalize the self .
At other times, the subject will identify with the rejecting object (RO) and
cruelly reject the self . At still other times, the subject will identify
with the attacking object (AO) and cruelly attack the self.
Consequently, in the cell originally incorrectly allotted
to the anti-LE, I substitute what I call the destructive ego (DE) which refers
to the rage and destructiveness the infant feels in reaction to tantalization
by the exciting object, or to rejection by the rejecting object, or to
persecution by the attacking object. This rage and destructiveness is
then taken over by the anti-LE (the self as identified with the bad objects)
and turned against the self. Hence, the rage of the destructive ego (DE)
is retroflected and used to attack not only the libidinal ego (LE) for its
intensified and inflamed neediness, greediness and envy, and the persecuted ego
(PE) for its sheer, shameful helplessness, but also to attack itself (DE)
for its hatred.
|
|
GOOD
|
BAD
|
BAD
|
BAD
|
|
PARENT
|
IO
|
EO
|
RO
|
AO
|
|
CHILD
|
CE
|
LE
|
Destructive Ego ......... (DE)
|
PE
|
|
|
|
RE
|
RE
|
RE
|
In my view, Fairbairn's model of endopsychic structure,
especially when elaborated in these ways, constitutes a helpful tool for the
understanding of both pre-oedipal and oedipal pathology. (In this
perspective, the Oedipus essentially entails regarding one parent as the good
object [IO] and the other parent, the rival, as a bad object.)
Grotstein and Rinsley's collection should assist the
psychoanalytic community to develop the deeper and more detailed understanding
of Fairbairnian theory that it deserves.
Notes
1. Many of the authors in this
volume are quite critical of Guntrip's attempts to communicate and to elaborate
upon Fairbairn's ideas. I wish to draw readers' attention to the helpful
review and clarification of this debate by Forbes (1996).
References
Cooley, C.H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. New
York :
Schocken, 1964.
Schocken, 1964.
Erikson, E. (1959). Identity and the Life Cycle. Psychological Issues Monograph
1.New York :
Int. Univ. Press.
1.
Forbes, M. (1996). Guntrip's contribution: an
analysis of his major departures
from Fairbairn.Can. J. Psychoanal./Rev. Can.
from Fairbairn.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams.
S.E.,
4-5.
-----. (1917 [1915]). Mourning and melancholia.
S.E.,
14.
-----. (1923). The Ego and the Id. S.E., 19.
-----. (1940 [1938]). An Outline of Psycho-Analysis.
S.E.,
23.
Guntrip, H. (1971). Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self. New York :
Basic Books.
Basic Books.
Hartmann, H. (1939). Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. New
York : Int. Univ. Press, 1958.
York
Kernberg, O. (1976). Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis.
New York :
Aronson.
Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection,
trans. A. Sheridan. New York :
Norton.
Mead, G.H. (1937). Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. C. Morris. Chicago : Univ. of
Chicago
Winnicott, D.W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms
of true and false self. In The
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.London : Hogarth
Press, 1965, pp.140-152.
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.
Press, 1965, pp.140-152.
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