Steps in the Development of an Object-relations Theory of the Personality, Fairbairn (1949)

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The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects, Fairbairn (1943)

What kinds of mental content do we repress? According to Freud, we repress memories and impulses that cause pain and guilt. Fairbairn writes that we repress bad internalized objects. Yes, we repress memories but memories of objects identified with bad internalized objects. And yes, we repress impulses but impulses impelling us to have relationships with bad objects. We repress bad internalized objects for two reasons. First, we repress bad internalized objects to avoid feeling bad about ourselves. This follows because early object-relationships are based on identification, meaning that during these relationships we’re not yet able to differentiate ourselves from our caregivers. Second, we repress bad internalized objects because as young children it is anxiety-provoking to believe that our caregivers are bad. To put it in religious terms, “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil.”[1] Why, it might be asked, does the child internal...
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Schizoid Factors in the Personality, Fairbairn (1940)

Fairbairn wants to focus on schizoid mental processes, which exist on a spectrum, schizophrenia existing at one extreme. He wants to focus on schizoid processes for a number of reasons, one of them being that these processes are experienced by most patients, even those considered non-schizoid — e.g., patients described as hysterical, obsessional, and phobic individuals. The “fundamental schizoid phenomenon is the presence of splits in the ego,” a feature shared by all people. (Although theoretically, someone “whose development had been optimum” might not have such splits.) At the most extreme level, a split in one’s ego results in depersonalization or derealization; at a less extreme level, a split can result in one feeling artificial or emotionally disconnected from friends. Psychoanalysis have long believed that schizoid processes are caused by a fixation in the early oral stage. The infant at this stage focuses on taking (over giving), which comes in the forms of incorporation and ...
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(1) Psychoanalysis and the Sense of Guilt (1958) Freud believed that guilt was a type of anxiety in which love and hate coexisted. Guilt, he thought, developed in early childhood in the context of the child’s first three-person (triangular) relationship. In the Oedipal situation, a boy develops sexual desires for his mother, and in hopes of having his mother to himself, he comes to hate his father and long for his death. At the same time, the boy loves and respects his father. And so this ambivalence — both hate and love for his father — results in his first experience of guilt. In time, the boy comes to introject his father, thus giving birth to his superego. Klein believed that guilt developed before the Oedipal stage in the context of the two-person (mother-child) relationship. She believed that the infant at times feels aggressive, destructive impulses toward its mother. As the infant comes to learn that the mother has survived her aggression, she attempts to make reparations and f...
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