Felt security

termed repression (Freud, 1915). The result of suppression is diversion of consciousness away from distressing ideas and memories of events originating in the ego’s conflicts with the id and outer world that nevertheless “retain their quota of affect undiminished” (p. 214, Vol. 2, S.E., S. Freud, 1895). When an individual’s defenses restrict affects from their normal path to consciousness, the affects are “inaccessible to his conscious reflection” (p. 237, Vol. 18, S.E., S. Freud, 1920).

They may be released, however, by the individual’s current experiences in which the ego yields to the pathological significance of psychical traumas from the remote past (S. Freud, 1895, 1920).

Object relations theory differs from structural drive theory in a fundamental way. Object relations theorists, such as Fairbairn (1954), have posited that an individual’s inner psychic structures arise from early relations with caregivers, rather than being an epigenetic unfolding of instinctual drives (Greenberg & S. Mitchell, 1983). Furthermore, the relationship between the infant and the object of his gratification is primary in development, not secondary. This means that the infant does not come to learn about his caregiver only through the processes associated with the gratification of his hunger and the caring for his body — alternatively, the propensity for infant-parent relatedness through primary object-seeking is innate. Viewing object-seeking as instinctual pushed aside the idea that an infant does not perceive its caregiver (i.e., primary narcissism). In a 1941 paper titled “A revised psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses”, Fairbairn took leave of structural drive theory in expressing his view that development was not essentially an unfolding of drives occurring only within the infant, rather, the infant is motivated by the primary need for relationship.

Fairbairn (1941) conceived of the newborn infant as possessing an ego equipped with the capacity and the need to relate, albeit this ego emerges in an undifferentiated form. In this scheme there is no id. The child’s ego develops from the outset by internalizing the mother-object as “bad” in proportion and to the extent that the relationship is unsatisfactory. The child subsequently takes in the object of the mother as “good” in order to ward off the dangers incorporated with the first “rejecting” object. Placing object-seeking on the same footing as primary drives or instincts explained the propensity of children to remain related to bad objects or even bad parents; a propensity that could not be efficiently explained in terms the conditioning necessary to form secondary drives (West & Keller, 1994).

Fairbairn (1954), however, did not wholly abandon the viewpoints of Freud. He continued to use the concepts of ego-splitting and repression to account for the effects of objects that the child experienced as excessively painful and rejecting. Compared to structural drive theory, however, the proponents of object relations theory have placed much more importance on a child’s actual 41