Ego Psychology and Communication
Norman A. Polansky
Chapter 6- The Theory of Object Relations

We turn now to an area of theory that is among the most exciting and promising contributions by the newer ego psychology to our work with people. It is called, in a general way, the theory of object relations.
     By object relations we refer to the way in which our patient relates himself with the other humans who have more than passing meaning in his life. The use of the term is partly determined by historical accident. Originally in Freudian psychology a personal object usually referred to the object of a drive. Suppose you feel sexually excited. A person may then come to mind as the one with whom you seek to satisfy the need--or at least you fantasy doing so. That person is conceived to be the drive's "object," the image of a person associated with the act which is the aim of the drive. Our thoughts about other people serve many functions in our lives besides their roles as drive-objects. We use them also in the service of defense. But the term object relations has continued to be employed in a way that means nothing more precise than did the notion "Significant Other" in the psychology of George Herbert Mead (1934) or Harry Stack Sullivan (1947).
     I will begin the discussion by presenting some ideas taken largely from the work of Fairbairn, a Scottish analyst, whose writings have been extremely important for many workers involved in direct treatment of severely regressed, hospitalized persons. Of course, my presentation is not intended as a summarization of Fairbairn (1952); rather, I will give him the interpretation that has made the most sense to me. For a more exact description of his theory, and indeed of those English and continental analysts who have done so much to advance ego psychology in recent years, I strongly recommend the excellent volume by Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction (1961). Let us return to things observable.

Some Common Phenomena
Anyone who has seen persons suffering from schizophrenia cannot fail to be impressed with their isolation. Sometimes they go to the extreme of physical withdrawal, by either running away or shutting out stimuli. Always there is emotional detachment and interpersonal coldness. Psychiatrists used to refer to the schizophrenic's characteristic handshake: it is a fervent form of human contact, roughly like clasping the tail of a dead fish. Even the schizophrenic with more capacity for relationship prefers a noncommittal stance. If, for example, you give a Likert-type attitude test (1932)--meaning you ask whether the subject Strongly Agrees, Agrees, or Strongly Disagrees with a series of statements--you get a typical pattern of response. They choose the noncommittal responses: weak agreement or disagreement or, preferably, "Doesn't matter" (Polansky et al., 1957). The most severe forms of withdrawal require discounting reality altogether, so that the patient experiences hallucinations and the like.
     We used to think that one either was or was not schizophrenic. Now we find it more helpful to think about patients as falling along a continuous dimension we call the schizoid spectrum. A person suffering from active, acute schizophrenic illness is far out on the spectrum. But let us discuss a more "normal" person who is not psychotic, the schizoid personality.
     In daily life we come into contact with many schizoid personalities. They are not nearly so withdrawn as the ill schizophrenic; indeed, it may require some acquaintance to appreciate just how detached the schizoid person is. He has often made strenuous efforts to compensate for and mask his pattern. The college professor who acts so engrossed in his books and papers that he scarcely notices his surroundings, much less his wife and children, may well be schizoid. So may be the backslapping politician, salesman, or banker who seems warm and friendly, until you discover how indiscriminately he distributes his warmth and how reserved the expression in his eyes remains. Even the physician who exudes bedside manner may suddenly stand revealed as essentially shy and shrinking from any human contact not ritualized into his professional role.
     The schizoid personality, then, is frequently odd, self-centered, basically unfeeling toward you. But he does not feel much about anything. He suffers from what we call severe affect inhibition. This does not mean he has no feelings; it does mean that he blocks out his feelings so that he is literally unable to be consciously aware of them.
     Let us cite still another example. You are a caseworker in an institution for delinquent youngsters. For the past two months you have been having regular interviews with a boy named Pete, struggling to try to breach his wall of toughness and bravado to the point at which you can involve him in treatment. At the last interview you finally had a glimmering of hope. After all the interest and affection you have proffered him, he muttered, "Well, I guess you'll do." You spoke hopefully about his progress at the staff meeting this morning, only to be coldly informed by the supervisor of cottage life that Pete escaped from the institution last night. Here is a clear implication that another gullible young social worker has been outfoxed by a fourteen-year-old "psychopath." Flashing through your mind is the sneering voice of an elderly psychiatrist describing the psychopath as "the asp in your bosom." At the moment, you hate this kid, and all his kind. Even after you calm down a bit, there remain the questions: Why did he do this to me? And, why, just when we seemed to be getting somewhere?
     Here, then, are examples of people who pass through our professional lives. Obviously, I believe they are all related to one another. But how? To answer this question, let us leave our cases for the moment and take a little excursion into developmental psychology. I will talk about life as an infant feels it.

A Developmental View
     Nobody really knows how the newborn experiences life, perhaps he least of all. And all reconstructions of the emotional life of the very young infant are necessarily speculative. Why, you may ask, bother to try to theorize in such terms at all?
     The answer derives from a fundamental precept about human growth and development. Earlier experiences predetermine the later. This follows from the proclivity of the organism to change following experience, otherwise known as learning. Once you have enjoyed lemon pie, your anticipation of it will never be the same. The next piece is approached with a hopefulness based on the way you last tasted it, and with a standard that may well be disappointed. The older you get, the more you have already experienced, the more your later responses are already influenced by what has gone before. When you have become totally incapable of new or spontaneous reactions, you are said to be middle-aged. Because early life experiences have such far-reaching consequences over the total personality, it is obvious that any good theory of personality functioning must pay great attention to the earliest months, and even weeks, of life.
     Even though we do not know the neonate's mind, we can make some rather solid inferences. In the first few hours of life, the principal preoccupation of the organism is with obtaining food. The milk from the mother's breast offers two essential ingredients: water, without which the whole internal bodily environment comes to a halt, and nourishment. We may extrapolate, therefore, that the hungry, thirsty infant experiences terror that he might shrivel up from lack of water or collapse from lack of food-energy. In a vague, unformulated way there must be a sense that he can wither away and, literally, cease to exist as an organism. I believe the terror of loneliness that older patients feel derives ultimately from this primordial childhood fear of death by desiccation. From less marked forms of the same emotional root we get the dread feeling of emptiness reported by so many of our schizoid patients as well as the somewhat intellectualized version described as the sense of meaninglessness.
     The child needs desperately to be assured that nourishment will be forthcoming as he requires it. If he does not get this assurance, he is overcome with futility, one of the most distinguishing marks of the schizoid personality. This is the feeling that "nothing will do any good," because in the long run there is only disaster. A young patient once exclaimed, "What's the use of eating dinner? You will only be hungry by breakfast." The feeling of futility is not the same as depression : a depressed person may be miserable, but he still feels. The sense of futility is accompanied by a relative absence of feeling, taking the forms, "I feel empty...." "I am a nothing...." "I feel dead inside...." From all accounts, it is a paralyzing inner state, resting on childhood despair.
     It is common to implicate the inadequacies of the mother in producing or reinforcing this feeling in the young child. That is, any of us is liable to it, because this is the nature of life, the ultimate existential anxiety if you will. But if we are regularly given supplies, we may dare to hope. However, I no longer presume the root of the trouble can always be definitely identified in the maternal personality. Some infants are born with highly sensitive or incompletely matured digestive systems. We found once, upon closely rescrutinizing the early history of a series of schizoid adolescents, that a series of five out of six had had early feeding difficulties. Several were still unable to stand the taste of milk, and all five had been shifted from milk to a formula in infancy. Whether due to something in the early mother-child relationship, or to the infant's physiology, the net result is his feeling that "the milk of life itself is poisoned." Such a reaction hardly helps to ward off the feeling of futility, to which each of us is potentially heir.
     In popularized psychology it is common to speak of "insecurity." From the examples given, the textbook writer has something terribly dramatic in mind. The sorority sister is "insecure" about whether her hem is straight or her boyfriend will like her lipstick. When we talk about security maneuvers in ego psychology, we are referring to defenses against ultimate dreads regarding life and death to which every man is necessarily subject.
     Paraphrasing Fairbairn, we say that every infant has to come to some conclusion about how hopefully he will approach life, how he will resolve the schizoid position. Depending on the kind of mothering he is offered, and how he experiences that mothering, he may emerge with what Erikson (1950) described as "basic mistrust" or "basic trust." In relationships with others, the question is whether he believes human contacts can be relied on to be ultimately rewarding. Or does each new close attachment already promise to end in anger, anxiety, and disappointment? Patients described as having problems in the schizoid spectrum are those who have jelled their fundamental attitudes around a combination of futility and a fear of closeness.
     From the fear of closeness we can already derive a number of insights into a class of defensive operations we call distance maneuvers. If closeness threatens hurt for you or for the object, if tenderness makes you vulnerable, if warmth and taking love bring tears to your eyes, then you have to erect defenses until your basic responses are somewhat alleviated. However, before we proceed with our discussion of distance maneuvers, let us consider another set of ideas, those of John Bowlby (1961).

Separation Anxiety
     Fairbairn's theories are especially instructive in understanding the fear of relationship present in schizoid personalities and, indeed, in all of us. He has also formulated a conception of "splitting" in the ego which helps to understand some of the concreteness and disorganization encountered in the thoughts of deeply disturbed people. Bowlby's observations, however, seem to me to clarify certain issues beyond the point where Fairbairn left them.
     Bowlby began his work with a major attempt to understand the effects on the young infant of being separated from his mother (1951). Thanks to Hitler, this was a problem of urgent social as well as theoretical impact. Eventually it became clear in Bowlby's research (and that of others) that maternal separation as such is not a univocal phenomenon with consistent sequellae. Its resultants in the child depend on the age of separation, the presence of substitute objects, and so forth. But Bowlby did clarify a concept that had not previously been so emphasized: separation anxiety (1960).
     Separation anxiety can be typified by this scene. Picture a very small child, helpless, easily damaged, who is being held to his mother's breast. Should the mother suddenly let go of the child, he would find himself wrenched from security, and falling alone and desolate through space, just as so many of us did in nightmares in childhood. Or imagine the feeling we have momentarily when a high-speed elevator drops beneath us-again the terror at falling through space. To Bowlby this terror is the primordial form of all anxiety, which is to say the various other forms of anxiety--superego anxiety or the fear of internal punishment for guilt, ego anxiety, the sense of being overwhelmed by stimuli--all ultimately derive from this basic form.
     Certainly it is true that separation anxiety plays a powerful role in object relations. A woman will remain in a loveless and exhausting marriage not, really, because she is "masochistic." She may be unable to tear loose from an attachment, once it is formed. Another reason schizoid adolescents keep their distance is that as soon as they start to like someone, they already begin to dread the pangs of the relationship's ending. To avoid the ending, they decline the beginning. Because of their dread of separation anxiety, they starve themselves of human warmth in the first place. "Playing it safe," they guarantee their loneliness.
     Bowlby became interested in the reactions of infants old enough to be attached to their mothers when the mother left them. He reports a regular sequence of events, three stages through which the human infant seems to go. First, after his mother leaves, he looks uncomfortable and threshes around. Then he becomes angry and protests, reminding us that the basic function of anger is to push the external world around. If the wailing has no effect, and mother does not return, he eventually stops his outburst, but lapses into a phase of despair in which he looks and acts depressed. Eventually this seems to pass, too, and the infant comes to terms with his fate. But he comes to terms without joy, sullenly. His calmness represents no peace but resignation. To Bowlby, he is now detached.
     The phases following separation from mother may then be listed: protest, despair, detachment. I do not pretend to know a lot about young children, but I have found Bowlby's identification of these phases meaningful in working with adolescents and adults. It is not necessary to dig through case histories other than our own to realize that we all employ detachment as a kind of ultimate defense against the pain of loss of someone we love. And not to have felt this pain is to have been so unlucky as never to have loved.
     I have often noticed that when working with a delinquent or a schizoid adolescent who may not be delinquent at all, one gets very similar reactions. Each youngster begrudges liking--for you as for everyone else. He is both detached and affect-inhibited. Oh yes, he can express anger quite well. Hostility serves to support the basic removal. Tenderness and love are the dangerous emotions. Should the youngster begin to like you, should his resolute detachment begin to crumble, it is not uncommon to find him immediately overcome by sadness. His eyes fill with tears, he gets a catch in his throat. The reaction is unconscious, seemingly automatic. He feels unmanly, and wants to run away. No wonder, then, that the delinquent child in the institution fled the caseworker just at that point when he was admitting he liked him. Intermixed with the depressiveness, by the way, there is often anger. Instead of the cold and arrogant front, you are suddenly dealing with a miserable, angry child. In my experience as a therapist, I have never seen any real change occur in a schizoid adolescent when we did not repeat in treatment this sequence of penetrating the detachment not once but a number of times (see also Thomas, 1967). That the detachment is only a defense and not a final resolution is readily demonstrable in our own lives. There may be a girl you once loved, but of whom you have not really thought in years. Should you suddenly confront her, however, you are swept by unexpected emotion.
    Let us return to Fairbairn and Bowlby. Each has independently made some acute observations; each has formulated an engaging and fruitful set of concepts for relating the object relations formed by our clients to preoccupations of the first year of life. But the two theories are not ready to be brought together in rigorous fashion and detail. Bowlby's emphasis on separation anxiety and its derivatives certainly clarifies many points concerning both infants and adults. Fairbairn is far the richer in insights regarding the ego operations of schizoid personalities and schizophrenics. We become sharply aware that everyone, without exception, has problems in the schizoid range. The notion of the schizoid position provides insights into the workings of hysterical and compulsive personalities, too, and further simplifies our understanding of these character structures.

The Paranoid Position
     While many American analysts have busied themselves with becoming rich and acquiring high office in their professional and academic organizations, the serious and creative work of advancing ego psychology has taken place in England. We come now to a few ideas of Melanie Klein, whom we must regard as quasi-English, as she came originally from central Europe. Although Mrs. Klein was well-known as a child analyst, her ideas have attracted an important following in England among those practicing adult analysis. Indeed, there is now something referred to as a "Kleinian analysis" distinguished, inter alia, by its unusual length even by the standards of our affluent society.
     The Kleinians are a controversial group, perhaps in part because of the difficulty in deciphering the key ideas in Klein's writings, and their leaders have been accused of substituting a kind of mysticism for theory. Nevertheless, there are two concepts associated with Mrs. Klein's work which I have found quite valuable in understanding some patients (1952). One has to do with the paranoid position; the other, which is also present in Fairbairn, is splitting the object. Let me illustrate what I mean.
     There is a kind of woman we encounter who is extremely unpleasant. Not only does she nag, she does so in a harsh, penetrating, accusatory voice which carries through doors and walls; you can even hear it in your dreams. She is filled with self-righteous indignation; indeed, she is addicted, to it. There is a hardness, a brittleness, a mercilessness about her, which gives no quarter to the one with whom she is angry; forgives no weakness; understands no toleration. It is only after you know her for a time that you realize she is in pain nearly as often as she gives pain. She is equally intolerant with herself and constantly under tension to demonstrate that she is not fallible and not to blame. If this description recalls the paranoid character, and some of those we otherwise think of as hysterics, the resemblance is intentional.
     Gradually, in treating such a person, you become aware that she lives with an inner voice quite as nasty as the one she exposes to view. It is as if there were a small person in the back of her mind constantly persecuting her in the same merciless way. The image is not conscious, at least at first. Is it the voice of a real person? There is certainly a real image which the patient carries around with her and which is part of the patient. The image is real, also, in that it has effects on the patient's feelings and how she acts toward others. But who is the source of this persecutory anxiety; whom does this internalized icon resemble? Who seems to be saying, "You are worthless; you always were a nothing; you never will be anyone?" Eventually it turns out that the bitter image is the patient's mother!
     This seems odd, for often when the worker goes over his notes he finds that the patient either spoke of her mother only in adulatory terms, at first, or else did not mention her at all. It was her father at whom she was the more consciously enraged. But now it proves to be her mother who is so unyieldingly demanding.
     When I first encountered this, I believed the patient's mother was in fact the virago finally described, but the patient had not dared say so out loud. From Klein and others, however, we learn the situation is more complicated. The patient walks around with two mother images. One, who is all-giving, all-wise, tender, and beyond criticism is the "good mother," and she is the one to whom we are typically first introduced. The other is evil, filled with malice, implacable; the "bad mother." Usually neither is the real mother, of course. If the patient had really been born to the bad mother she carries around in her mind, she would not have survived the first year of life. She has taken the real person who was her mother and split her into two walled-off, mutually exclusive images. We refer to this as the good mother-bad mother split.
     A tendency to split the object may reveal itself in a variety of ways. One pervasive effect is to have the kind of personality that deals only in extremes--everything is either black or white, with few grays. The patient lacks "tolerance for ambiguity." Kernberg (1966) has pointed out that the tendency to split the world into walled-off categories represents a failure to develop the ability to synthesize, which we expect in more mature minds. Such childish people live in a world peopled by saints or devils.
     Our patient, just described, has split her mother into two images, and then has done another typical thing. She personified each image by a single person. Thus her mother was all good; her father became all evil. Take these same dynamics and apply them to young men whose hatred of their fathers was formerly ascribed to the Oedipus complex. We now recognize that, quite as often, the threatening, hated father actually derives from one-half the ambivalence experienced toward the mother. Patients also do something very like this in more current relationships. While the individual therapist is a sweet, dear man, the ward administrator is an ugly, mean tyrant. We have to watch for the danger of such splits in marital counseling. The lady who comes to work out a better marriage may fall into the habit of regarding her caseworker as the good mother. Her husband, with whom she was to have repaired relations, is now dismissed as the bad. An understanding of the dynamics involved teaches us forcefully that there is no such thing as a consistently "positive transference" (cf. Garrett, 1958). There is only suppression or displacement of the negative elements of an essentially ambivalent relationship.
     What is the source of these powerful, conflicting emotions? They derive from the ambivalence toward our mothers which all of us must experience. Because we are infants when we have these feelings, they are intense, raw, primitive, powerful. The reason we have mixed emotions toward our mother derives from the fact that we have love for her. The mother who cuddles, who warms, who feeds us and relieves our pain is the same woman who inevitably lets us down. She angers and frustrates us because she is, after all, human. She cannot always offer gratification and security immediately. There are delays-because she does not hear us immediately, because others also make demands on her, even because she is momentarily tired. The person who is so invested with love is necessarily exposed to becoming the object of rage. The infantile mind, like the primary process in the adult, knows no reality limitations. How common it is for childish patients to assume that if their parents do not give them what they need, it is because they do not want to! They accuse them of evil intent. There is no room in their schema for inability. They need their parents to be all-powerful so they can be all-giving, and they hate to be reminded, "You are sucking on a dry tit!"
     The part of the maternal image against which the hate is directed, then, is split off in the infant's mind to form the bad-mother image. The attitudes of this bad-mother image are venomous, violent, mordant. Where did these feelings originate? They came, originally, from the patient. They are his own feelings of rage now associated with, or projected, if you will, into his mother. Let me say, once again, that the bad-mother image whispering scornfully in the back of the mind of our driven, over-meticulous and bitter lady is part of the patient. It is evident that the feelings involved are, in fact, the patient's own, from the time of earliest childhood. It is easy to understand why a person dominated by such an organization should have such a need to project the persecutory anxiety. How good it feels to be able to say, "I am not evil; you are."
     What I have just presented is not, of course, pure Melanie Klein, but my integration of her concepts into other observations and other theories as I have learned from them. Still, it is evident that her ideas offer powerful leads to parsimonious and effective formulations about our cases. The relationship of her ideas to Fairbairn's is fairly clear. Both emphasize traumata potential in the infant's early relationship with his mother. Bowlby, in turn, is aware of Klein's conceptions and disagrees with some of them. Once again, we are left with a nugget of the theory of object relations not quite ready to be integrated with the remainder--or, at least, not until there has been further work on both theory and clinical observation.
     As the student of personality theory might infer, these various ideas are evolving side by side because the time seems ripe for them (Winnicott, 1955). They are all representative of a particular Zeitgeist which, it seems to me, has come to fruition much more in England than in the United States. They have roots, by the way, in certain conceptions of ego psychology that were not so popular earlier in the Freudian movement, those of Horney (1937), Rank (1947), some in Adler (1917), to mention schismatics. Some of the ideas were developing among the Berlin group of psychoanalysts before Hitler. I shall later refer to the equally penetrating, if fragmentary, ideas of Hellmuth Kaiser (originally a member of the Berlin Institute) which were, to the best of my knowledge, evolved independently of the English school. Nevertheless, the reader will recognize in Kaiser's emphasis on the human's dread of loneliness, and his need to create a defensive delusion of fusion, assumptions about man that are quite compatible with the work of Bowlby and others.

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