into experience-near terms like “love” and “guilt”: “Synthesis between feelings of love and destructive impulses towards one and the same object—the breast—give rise to depressive anxiety, guilt, and the urge to make reparation to the injured love object, the good breast” (1952a, 203). The objects of this inner world follow law-like mental processes, among them, introjection, projection, and projective-identification. Most important for its implications for a person-oriented theory of object relations, Klein envisions a world of internalized objects in which sexual aims and sexual objects are not, as in Freud, isolated from each other: “There is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life” (1952b, 53).
Because of the extent to which he repudiated instinct theory in favor of an object-relations orientation, Fairbairn’s role was even more pivotal than Klein’s. Fairbairn did away with the death instinct, and with the id. He states the relevant positions succincdy in his synopsis (1963): “There is no death instinct; and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation” (224). “Since libido is a function of the ego and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation, there is no such thing as an ‘id’” (224). He almost, but not quite, did away with libido as well, his most revolutionary statement in this regard being, “The ego, and therefore libido, is fundamentally object-seeking” (224). Fairbairn launched what looked like a frontal, all-out attack on libido theory in his 1941 paper, where he devoted an early section of the paper to “the inherent limitations of the libido theory,” arguing that the time has come for classic libido theory to be transformed into a theory of object relations, that “the great limitation of the present libido theory as an explanatory system resides in the fact that it confers the status of libidinal attitudes upon various manifestations which turn out to be merely techniques for regulating the object-relationships of the ego” and that “the ultimate goal of libido is the objert” (1952, 31; italics Fairbairn’s). Although Fairbairn did not fully and officially liberate himself from the concept of libido, he may be said to have done so in a virtual way. One sees this change, for example, in the case he mentions of a female patient so desperate for attention and affection from her father, a detached and unapproachable man, that the thought occurs to her one day, “Surely it would appeal to him if I offered to go to bed with him!” (1952, 37). Fairbairn’s “take” on this thought is that it constitutes a kind of pseudo-incest: “Her incestuous wish thus represented a desperate attempt to make an emotional contact with her object” (37; italics added). Later he adds, “What emerges as clearly as anything else from the analysis of such a case is that the greatest need of a child is to obtain conclusive assurance (a) that he is genuinely loved as a person by his parents, and (b) that his parents genuinely accept his love” (39). The frustration of not being loved, and not having his love accepted, “is the greatest trauma that a child can experience,” writes Fairbairn (40), who, in contrast to Freud’s tendency to think in terms of quantities of excitation, stresses “the quality of dependence upon the object” (40) and, by implication, the quality of treatment by the object.
Fairbairn needs to be recognized as an important forerunner of attachment theory, especially in connection with his remarks on wartime neurosis and psychosis. His experience of military cases leaves him in no doubt that “the chief predisposing factor in determining the breakdown of a soldier . . . is infantile dependence upon his objects,” the most distinctive feature of military breakdowns being “separation-anxiety” (1952, 79-80). He discusses several cases (256-88). The drift of the problems is that those who seem to need to go home because they are ill in actuality become psychologically ill because they need to go home! In line with what Fairbairn has in common with attachment theory (though in a different context), Greenberg and Mitchell remark that for Fairbairn “the essential striving of the child is not for pleasure but for contact. He needs the other. If the other is available for gratifying, pleasurable exchange, the child will enter into pleasurable activities.” But if the parent offers only painful or unfulfilling contacts, they add, “the child does not abandon the parent to search for more pleasurable opportunities. The child needs the parent, so he integrates his relations with him on a suffering, masochistic basis” (1983, 173).
The work of Winnicott is so well known and so uncontroversial as to warrant summarizing his contributions to person-oriented object relations theory with a brevity disproportionate to his influence. Not being a systematic theorist may have made it easier for him to retain his official allegiance to traditional instinct theory while in practice he sustained a decidedly person-oriented position, with only occasional lapses, such as the Kleinian tenor of his technique with the so-called Piggle case mentioned earlier. Winnicott’ s contributions to person-oriented theory take many forms, one of them being his enlargement of the psychoanalytic scene by paying at least as much attention to children’s actual relationships with their real mothers as he did to their internalized (m)others. He regarded Klein as giving lip service to environmental factors but as being temperamentally incapable of giving them their due (1962, 177). Winni-cotfs concepts of transitional objects and transitional phenomena continue to be influential, as does the attention he paid to object-relational aspects of the location of cultural experience and the nature of the creative process (1971). He also helped to survey the location of the origin of madness by pinning it down, essentially, to the experience of separation anxiety (1971, 97), a position consonant with Fairbairn’s assumptions about the development of wartime psychosis. Characteristic of the fundamental soundness of Winnicott’s ideas about object relations, and perhaps representative of other things that might be included among his contributions, is his understanding of the importance of the possibility of self-object differentiation taking place without triggering unbearable feelings of interpersonal isolation. He understood the paradox that only in the presence of their mothers can children develop the capacity to be alone (1958, 29-36), and the further paradox that separateness (in the sense of being alone but not lonely) can be experienced without the loss of a sense of relatedness by virtue of the possibility of the benign internalization of the good object, and by virtue of what Winnicott refers to as the “use” of an Object (1971, 86-94).
Guntrip, who enjoyed the distinct advantage of being analyzed by both Fairbairn and Winnicott (see Guntrip 1975), makes his own contribution in the form of integrating the views of others. “The history of psychoanalysis is the history of the struggle for emancipation, and the slow emergence, of personal theory or object-relational thinking” he writes in his last book (1971, 46), where he records these developments. After criticizing Freud’s libido theory as mechanistic and nonpsychological (31-34), Guntrip classifies sexuality as an “appetite,” like hunger, thirst, excretion, and other bodily needs, and remarks, “The appetites can all be endowed with personal-relationship significance” (35). “I have never yet met any patient,” he adds, “whose overintense sexuality and/or aggression could not be understood in object-relational terms, as resulting from too great and too early deprivations of mothering and general frustration of healthy development in his childhood” (40). In praise of Klein’s contribution he writes, “She arrived at the fundamental truth that human nature is object-relational in its very essence, at its innermost heart” (58). Gun-trip also pays tribute to the strength of the social elements in the work of figures like Sullivan and Erikson. What seems most distinctive about Guntrip’s achievement in the context of the present discussion is his adoption of a definitive position, one fully embracing a person-oriented theory of object relations while rejecting drive-oriented explanations. At the same time, Guntrip contrives to be reality oriented (in the sense of external, interpersonal relationships) without obliterating, as attachment theory tends to do, the equally real realm of internalized object-relational processes.
While not all contributions to the development of a person oriented theory of object relations lend themselves to easy categorization, the group of figures Greenberg and Mitchell devote a chapter to under the heading of “Interpersonal Psychoanalysis” can scarcely be overlooked. Greenberg and Mitchell maintain that interpersonal psychoanalysis, unlike classical Freudian drive theory, does not qualify as an integrated theory. “It is instead a set of different approaches to theory and clinical practice held together by shared underlying assumptions
