Bollas expands the psychoanalytic understanding of object relations, contributing in particular an appreciation of what he calls ‘the integrity of the object’. By this he means the object’s intrinsic quality of being fundamentally itself, outside the sphere of projective mechanisms. There is an echo here of Winnicott’s seminal paper ‘The Use of an Object’ in which he describes the child’s joyful discovery of the object’s authentic realness, outside the realm of the child’s omnipotence, as a result of the object’s survival of ‘maximum destructiveness (object not protected)’ (1969: 91).
