Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting

by David P. Celani

W. R. D. Fairbairn (1889-1964) challenged the dominance of Freud's drive theory with a psychoanalytic theory based on the internalization of human relationships. Fairbairn assumed that the unconscious develops in childhood and contains dissociated memories of parental neglect, insensitivity, and outright abuse that are impossible the children to tolerate consciously. In Fairbairn's model, these dissociated memories protect developing children from recognizing how badly they are being treated and allow them to remain attached even to physically abusive parents.

Attachment is paramount in Fairbairn's model, as he recognized that children are absolutely and unconditionally dependent on their parents. Kidnapped children who remain attached to their abusive captors despite opportunities to escape illustrate this intense dependency, even into adolescence. At the heart of Fairbairn's model is a structural theory that organizes actual relational events into three self-and-object one conscious pair (the central ego, which relates exclusively to the ideal object in the external world) and two mostly unconscious pairs (the child's antilibidinal ego, which relates exclusively to the rejecting parts of the object, and the child's libidinal ego, which relates exclusively to the exciting parts of the object). The two dissociated self-and-object pairs remain in the unconscious but can emerge and suddenly take over the individual's central ego. When they emerge, the "other" is misperceived as either an exciting or a rejecting object, thus turning these internal structures into a source of transferences and reenactments. Fairbairn's central defense mechanism, splitting, is the fast shift from central ego dominance to either the libidinal ego or the antilibidinal ego-a near perfect model of the borderline personality disorder.

In this book, David Celani reviews Fairbairn's five foundational papers and outlines their application in the clinical setting. He discusses the four unconscious structures and offers the clinician concrete suggestions on how to recognize and respond to them effectively in the heat of the clinical interview. Incorporating decades of experience into his analysis, Celani emphasizes the internalization of the therapist as a new "good" object and devotes entire sections to the treatment of histrionic, obsessive, and borderline personality disorders.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps I should have started here. Two years ago I read WRD Fairbairn for the first time and struggled to wrap my mind around his most important essays. I suppose I half-understood him, kind of like when you force yourself to read a somewhat advanced foreign text but only have an elementary understanding of the language. If you take your Adderall and stay with it, you’ll realize that at times you vaguely understand what you’re reading, and that’s an absolutely thrilling experience and not necessarily a bad way to learn a foreign language.

Fairbairn kind of made sense to me, but David Celani makes him really make sense. He begins the book with a broad overview of Fairbairn’s oeuvre but then focuses on his endopsychic model, which consists of three dyads — the central ego and ideal object, the antilibidinal ego and rejecting object, and the libidinal ego and exciting object. I had always thought that Fairbairn’s “exciting object” was, well, an exciting object, that is, an over-stimulating object, a fun dad or seductive mother. Celani argues that this interpretation doesn’t make sense in the context of Fairbairn’s entire corpus. The exciting object is not exciting in the way we think of it but rather caring, nurturing, loving. The exciting object is the idealized parent, the caring, nurturing, loving parent the child wishes they had.

I don’t know if Celani is correct in this interpretation, but if we accept his thinking, then Fairbairn’s model suddenly becomes much more universal. It just doesn’t seem to be the case that many people struggle with an over-stimulating internal object, but I think we all have an idealized internal object, and once we understand Fairbairn’s structures this way — that is, one self longing for an idealized object, another self perpetually fighting a bad object, both dyads dissociated from one another — then we suddenly have a widely applicable model, one that helps us to understand splitting and see why so many of us remain so strongly attached to bad objects.

Not only does Celani explain Fairbairn, but he also takes the liberty to reform some of the Scotsman’s ideas. For instance, he contends that people internalize both good and bad objects, a claim that I don’t think anyone today would dispute. He also writes that clinical experience refutes Fairbairn’s belief that the above-mentioned dyads have awareness of one another. I think that anyone who has experienced someone organized at the borderline level would be sympathetic to Celani on this point.

Celani obviously reveres Fairbairn, but he does so in the healthy way that I think we’d all do well to emulate. He allows Fairbairn’s genius to inform his own practice, but far from turning the man into a deity, he channels his revolutionary spirit and sculpts a theory that honors his own clinical experience. I’m reminded here of Nietzsche’s Three Metamorphoses. Ideally, we start out as the camel and bear heavy loads and learn from the great thinkers of the past. We then become the lion and destroy what seems ridiculous and hypocritical. And finally we emerge as the child and shape a creation that’s our very own.