Object Relations Theory
The mind is populated by internalised relationships — self, other, and the affect that binds them — laid down in infancy and re-enacted throughout life, and therapy works by making those internal configurations available in the transference where they can be understood and modified.
We are not driven toward pleasure. We are driven toward people — and we carry them inside.
Who built it
Melanie Klein
1882–1960Analyst of young children
Internal objects, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, projective identification, and the analysis of very young children through play.
KleinianW. R. D. Fairbairn
1889–1964Scottish analyst
The decisive theoretical break: libido is object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking. Also the account of why abused children remain loyal to their abusers.
Object relationsD. W. Winnicott
1896–1971Paediatrician and analyst
The good-enough mother, the holding environment, transitional objects and phenomena, the true and false self, and the capacity to be alone. The most humane and the most widely borrowed.
Independent / middle groupWilfred Bion
1897–1979Analyst
Container and contained; the mother’s capacity to metabolise the infant’s unbearable states and return them thinkable; attacks on linking; the injunction to approach each session "without memory or desire".
Post-Kleinian
Theory of personality
Fairbairn’s reversal is the foundational move: the infant does not seek pleasure and use objects to obtain it; the infant seeks the object, and pleasure is a signpost. Everything else follows. Personality is built from internalised relationships, each consisting of a self-representation, an object-representation, and the affect linking them.
Klein’s two positions
Paranoid-schizoid position
- The object is experienced in parts — all good or all bad
- Splitting is the organising defense
- Anxiety is persecutory: I will be destroyed
- Projective identification is prominent
- Not a stage that is outgrown; a position returned to under stress
Depressive position
- The object is whole — good and bad in the same person
- Ambivalence can be tolerated
- Anxiety is depressive: I may have harmed what I love
- Guilt, concern and the wish to repair
- A developmental achievement, and never permanent
Winnicott’s contributions
- Good-enough mothering
- Not perfect care but reliable-enough care that fails gradually and tolerably, allowing the infant to develop the capacity to manage.
- Holding environment
- The reliable, non-impinging context within which development can occur; the model for the analytic setting.
- Transitional object
- The blanket or bear occupying the space between me and not-me — the origin of play, culture and creativity.
- True and false self
- The spontaneous, gesture-initiating self, and the compliant self built to meet the environment’s demands. False-self organisation produces a life of successful emptiness.
Theory of psychopathology
Pathology is a matter of internal configurations. Where early relationships were unbearable, the child internalises them anyway — Fairbairn’s point being that a child would rather be a sinner in a world governed by God than live in a world ruled by the Devil. Badness is taken into the self to preserve a good object outside it, and the resulting internal saboteur persists.
- Splitting: self and others experienced as wholly good or wholly bad, alternating
- Projective identification: a disowned state is induced in another, who then feels and acts it out
- False-self organisation: adaptation at the cost of aliveness
- Attacks on linking: the destruction of connections between thoughts, so that meaning cannot form
- Failure to reach the depressive position: no tolerance of ambivalence, therefore no capacity for repair
Theory of change
- 1The internal object relation is enacted in the transference, where it can be observed rather than reported.
- 2The analyst survives — is not destroyed by, does not retaliate against — the patient’s destructiveness. Winnicott’s "use of an object": the object becomes real precisely by surviving its destruction.
- 3Containment: the analyst metabolises what the patient cannot bear and returns it in a form that can be thought.
- 4Interpretation of the configuration: who is doing what to whom, in the room, now.
- 5Movement toward the depressive position: ambivalence tolerated, whole objects, the capacity for concern and repair.
Key concepts
The vocabulary you need to read the literature and to be understood in supervision.
Where it sits in the transtheoretical grid
Which change processes the system leans on, and at what level of content it aims.
- Consciousness raising
Increasing information about oneself and the problem - feedback, interpretation, education, observation.
- Catharsis / dramatic relief
Experiencing and expressing affect about the problem, whether by corrective emotional experience or by evoking what has been avoided.
- Helping relationship
Being open and trusting about problems with someone who cares; the relationship as vehicle, and as medicine in its own right.
- Self-reevaluation
Appraising how one thinks and feels about oneself with respect to the problem; values clarification.
- Intrapersonal conflicts
- Current interpersonal conflicts