Object Relations Index

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 ...

Unlocking the Emotional Brain— Bruce Eker, Robin Ticic, Laurel Hulley (2024)

May 06, 2024

Introduction Transformational change is possible. Therapists want to bring about transformational change, dispelling deeply entrenched emotional learnings, i.e., learnings “formed in the presence of intense emotion, such as core beliefs and constructs formed in childhood.” However, as late as the 1990s, neuroscientists believed that emotional learnings “indelible, unerasable, for the lifetime of the individual.” But then some neuroscientists discovered memory reconsolidation, a type of neuroplasticity that allows emotional learnings to be “not merely overridden by actually nullified and deleted by new learning.” This new learning, they found, “creates new neural circuits, but it is only when new learning also unwires old learning that transformational change occurs.” This book outlines the emotional coherence framework for psychotherapy, which provides a unifying account of (a) emotional learning and memory, (b) the unlearning and deletion of emotional implicit knowledge through memory...

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

October 21, 2023

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...

My Psychoanalytic Journey