Someone who shows in his actions that he does not want you should be easy to walk away from. But instead of this being an instant turn off, it sometimes merely attracts you all the more. Why is that so? One answer to the question comes from the object relations theory of W. R. D. Fairbairn (1889–1964).
I wasn’t sure whether there is any use to psychoanalysis at all. I had read some psychoanalysis in the past, but it all seemed like the barely coherent writings of someone who has never made a positive difference in any of his patients’ lives, preferring to focus on a systematic method for explaining why it’s actually the patient’s fault that his “cure”, never actually articulated in any concrete way, didn’t work.
Fairbairn, in a cursory reading, turned out to be different: his object relations theory made for an uncomfortably precise description of some situations I had experienced myself.
In the object relations theory, the psyche has a fundamental need to form “object relations”, or relations with an “object”, which is some person or entity from which it gets love, support, safety, etc.
Sometimes it happens that someone pursues a “bad” object, i.e., an object that is unable to provide these essential needs, or does so only intermittently. This is often the case with less than perfectly available parents, or in Fairbairn’s emphasis, specifically the mother. Because of a real or imagined dependence on this person, it is not possible, or it appears not possible, to sever ties with the bad object. Instead, the soul rephrases the unavailability as a consequence of its own intrinsic badness, transferring the blame from the object to itself. This results in a “split self”, a civil war of the soul, where one blames themselves for having simple human needs, and comes to a set of odd beliefs where having these needs is the cause of other people not fulfilling them.
In Fairbairn’s own words:
it also becomes a dangerous procedure for the child to express his libidinal need, i.e. his nascent love, of his mother in face of rejection at her hands; for it is equivalent to discharging his libido into an emotional vacuum. Such a discharge is accompanied by an affective experience which is singularly devastating. [...] the experience is one of shame over the display of needs which are disregarded or belittled.[1]
How to apply this developmental theory to adult relationships? Here’s a personal example. Consider someone who had been my “object”, namely the object of my need for attachment, love, belonging, togetherness, etc. However, he was unable to act the role of even a good enough object; the aforementioned needs did not see satisfaction in my interactions with him. Had my personality been secure (in the sense of not having experienced the aforementioned rejections of “libidinal needs”), I would have very early on been able to drop him and gone on my way looking for a more appropriate object.
However, my past has left me with a risk: rather than leaving a “bad object”, my instinct is to employ the so-called moral defense to exonerate it at the cost of my own self-esteem for fear of being left “objectless”: casting myself as “bad” for having the needs and feelings, for having tried to express them, for not being satisfied, the object remains blameless and thus my relationship to him has been preserved. This is how the bad object gets embedded deeper while at the same time my need for a good object, and therefore for him, is deepened.
Fairbairn’s own image for the moral defense is striking:
it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad; but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good [...]; and in any case there is always a hope of redemption. In a world ruled by the Devil the individual may escape the badness of being a sinner; but he is bad because the world around him is bad. Further, he can have no sense of security and no hope of redemption.[2]
What is the nature of the fear that keeps one bound to a bad object and which creates the need for the moral defense? In the course of a normal development, one would not have a need to internalize the object; it’s a defensive move that renders it more amenable to control. One would also have been left with an impression that good objects are in fact abundant in one’s environment and would have no trouble recognizing them and rejecting those that do not meet the minimum standards for what it takes to be a good object.
Instead, if one has internalized a bad object which provides little by way of emotional support, then the temptation is to whitewash it to make it appear good. An internalized bad object, like its external counterpart, does a bad job of satisfying any needs, leaving one liable to behavior that is either overly dependent, or else painfully aware of an internal sense of emptiness. One may then also pick up that objects, of any kind, are very scarce, and thus that it’s essential to hold onto the one at hand as tightly as possible.
Keeping a bad object takes more than blaming oneself. Both the object and the self get divided.
Internally, the bad object gets embedded as two entities, the exciting and the rejecting object, where the promising and the unavailable (or even punishing) characteristics become allocated to two almost entirely separate beings. Seen as the exciting object, the person holds the promise of love; seen as the rejecting object, they are entirely bad.
Together with the splitting of the object, the self or the ego gets split into two as well, the libidinal and antilibidinal selves. The latter becomes the locus of all hate, rage, anger, etc., against the object—feelings that are not safe for one to possess, since a child angry at their parents may fear losing the parents entirely if the anger were to surface. Instead, the anger may get turned inwards and contained in the antilibidinal ego. Conversely, the libidinal ego contains all the positive feelings of excitement, attraction, love, etc., towards the exciting object.
Altogether, these are Fairbairn’s 4 unconscious entities: antilibidinal ego, rejecting object, libidinal ego, exciting object.[3] Let’s give them names: Al and Lib.
Antilibidinal ego, “Al”:
Forms to deal with rejecting/frustrating parts of attachment figures. Consists of the impotent anger, hatred, vengeance towards the bad object—perfectly justified feelings.
The negative feelings are too dangerous to feel consciously or even express—there’s no alternative to a bad parent. That’s why the feelings get repressed into Al.[4]
Libidinal ego, “Lib”:
Develops in relation to the exciting object, which consists of memories/fantasies of the few times love was given or promised. It contains the hope/promise of love that keeps BPD individuals from collapsing into abandonment depression.[5]
Al hates the bad object, so why doesn’t he leave it? Why hold on to a bad object at all, instead of looking for a better one? The answer has to do with emptiness.
a very strong hostile attachment exists between the antilibidinal ego and its associated rejecting object. This attachment comes from the characterological patient’s desperate need for objects of any type in the inner world to counteract inner emptiness.[6]
This suggests a simple view of BPD: a maladaptive response to an inner sense of emptiness. DBT is effective as a cure to the extent that it provides effective means of dispelling the inner emptiness. But what is this emptiness? It’s a lack of objects, objects that should have been there. Object relation is a basic human need; in absence of good objects just about anything will do, even a frustrating bad object. That’s why the antilibidinal ego doesn’t drop the bad object.
Celani puts it this way:
These children are caught in a Kafkaesque reality where they are empty and abandoned. They are emotionally so young that they are only able to focus on one object whom they absolutely believe is the only possible source of nurturance. It is a cruel fate, as the most severely deprived individuals are bound more tightly to a worse object both externally, and more importantly, internally than those who are moderately deprived.[7]
If Al clings to the rejecting object out of emptiness, Lib clings to the exciting object out of hope.
Of course, the exciting object is far stickier, and the libidinal ego that clings to it “creates the most obvious havoc in the lives of many patients.” Lib’s unrealistic hope “leads the person to make decisions that have absolutely no relation to reality and invariably are detrimental to the individual’s own best interests.”[8] The relationship to the exciting object should be compared to a drug addiction: remembering the few times it felt amazing, but seemingly unaware that most of the time it feels mediocre or even awful, plus the punishment of withdrawal.
As Celani puts it:
it is not rejection that is devastating to the borderline individual but the loss of hope—the loss of the exciting aspect of the bad object[.][9]
Celani continues, quoting Armstrong-Perlman:
The loss of the relationship, or rather the hope of a relationship, cannot be borne.... The need is compulsive and the fantasy of loss is experienced as potentially catastrophic, either leading to the disintegration of the self, or a fear of a reclusive emptiness to which any state of connectedness, no matter how infused with suffering is preferable.[10]
The loss is experienced as final and irretrievable. There is now no hope the object will come back of its own accord. One becomes afraid of being alone forever, of never finding anyone like the lost object. It’s an experience of immense sadness: it has been a very special relationship. Lib is frightened that the Emptiness will engulf it, ending in death in unthinkable pain and suffering.
Lib will always want to leave the door open for the object to come back, to redeem itself. This is perhaps its way of softening the “abandonment crisis”.[11] It cannot give up the exciting object, even if it’s only a fantasy of hope. It can’t afford to lose it. Not until the central ego can win over the emptiness.
Unfortunately, the theory itself says little about how to actually go about releasing the bad object, apart from recognizing on an intellectual level what the dynamic has been. However, I know from past experience that merely understanding a pattern or dynamic is very different from disrupting it and replacing it with a better one, just like knowing how chess is played does not give you the power to win a game.
Celani makes the same point:
Fairbairn also assumed, somewhat naively, that the “libidinal cathexis” in the internalized bad object, which is equivalent to the relational concept of “attachment,” would somehow magically dissolve when the contents of the bad object memory was derepressed. Clinical experience strongly suggests that this is not the case. The “release” of a bad object memory is simply the first step in a long process of detoxification of its impact and importance.[12]
Patients often come into therapy with theories about themselves that only serve to protect the bad objects; that may be why they are stuck in life. So how do I know that what I’m saying is true, and not just an instance of my libidinal ego misleading me?
What does the object relations theory say one should do? If being stuck in an obviously inadequate relationship is due to an internalized bad object, then one should begin by dislodging the bad object. It has probably been internalized for a long time, so getting rid of it may be challenging, but it is the only way of reaching any meaningful improvement. One would likely also need to internalize a good object, and come to see them as abundant. Thus, one must
dissolve the cathexis to the exciting object and accept that the wish for the loving acceptance of the object is hopeless. The patient also has to feel that this no longer means that there is no hope for the self. He has to feel that he can survive the trauma of loss with sadness, and can mourn for that which he did not receive.[13]
The goal of treatment is to integrate these formerly intolerable split-off parts back into the conscious central ego and the good object. Strengthening the central ego reduces the illusory power of bad objects. Mature grief on realizing bad objects did not provide the love they should have becomes a core part of the central ego. The method is the creation of “narrative truth”, interpreting one’s life story in terms of Fairbairn’s metapsychology.[14]
But how is the cathexis to be dissolved, if understanding alone does not do it? Fairbairn makes the therapeutic relationship the decisive factor, on which interpretation and everything else the therapist does depends. Already in 1943 he suspected that good therapeutic results come about, in part at least, because
in the transference situation the patient is provided in reality with an unwontedly good object, and is thereby placed in a position to risk a release of his internalized bad objects from the unconscious and so to provide conditions for the libidinal cathexis of these objects to be dissolved[.][15]
In his late paper on treatment, he made the relationship itself the decisive factor:
In my own opinion, the really decisive factor is the relationship of the patient to the analyst, and it is upon this relationship that the other factors [...] depend not only for their effectiveness, but for their very existence, since in the absence of a therapeutic relationship with the analyst, they simply do not occur.[16]
And he did not mean the transference alone:
what I understand by “the relationship between the patient and the analyst” is not just the relationship involved in the transference, but the total relationship existing between the patient and the analyst as persons. After all, it is on the basis of the relationships existing between the individual and his parents in childhood that his personality develops and assumes its particular form; and it seems logical to infer that any subsequent change in his personality that may be effected by psycho-analytical treatment (or any other form of psychotherapy) must be effected primarily on the basis of a personal relationship.[17]
In CBT, by contrast, a good therapeutic relationship is usually considered necessary but not sufficient: it is the techniques that are expected to do the work.
Celani draws the practical conclusion for the exciting object:
the only way patients can finally let go of the fantasy that their exciting object contains love is for them to develop a powerful central ego–ideal object relationship with the therapist or analyst.[18]
Once the cathexis to the bad object has been dissolved, what follows need not be the feared abyss. In my experience, the pain of letting go is real, but it diminishes with time rather than increasing, as the fear had predicted; in its place comes a sense of fullness and freedom, and the ability to pursue relationships that are mutually sensible and meaningful, without feeling stuck in any of them.