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too powerful emotions the conduct of emotional life, in any case a severe problem, becomes intolerable… an [internal] object is installed which exercises the function of a severe and ego- destructive superego” (1959:107). In his subsequent writings, Bion (e g 1962,1963) developed the theory of projective-introjective process along the lines of “contained” and “container,” terms which he introduced to describe the interplay between the infant’s projective identifications and the mother’s receptive function both in its creative, life-promoting and destructive aspects. (See also entry CONTAINMENT: CONTAINER-CONTAINED). III C. Fairbairn: Object Relations and Dynamic Structures Ronald Fairbairn (1952) remodelled mid twentieth-century psychoanalysis in affording primacy to human interaction. In what amounts to a genuine paradigm shift, actual relational events are privileged over “a psychology of impulse” (1943: 59). In a series of papers written during the 1940s (cf. 1952, Part I), which comprise arguably the single most original contribution to object-relations thinking, Fairbairn set out a systematic and coherent alternative to classical drive theory. The Kleinian development was crucially important for Fairbairn, particularly the idea that the object is inscribed in the drive from the beginning. It is only in the light of Klein’s concept of internal objects, according to Fairbairn, “that a study of object- relationships can be expected to yield any significant results for psychopathology” (1943: 60). Taking the purposive nature of the drive as a critical point of departure, Fairbairn advanced two further propositions: (i) the ultimate goal of libido is the object (1941: 31 et passim ); and (ii) energy is inseparable from structure (1944: 126). Taken together, these two fundamental propositions underpin “a relationship psychology conceived on a basis of dynamic structure” (1944: 128), a psychology that not only recast the underlying scientific principles of classical libido theory, but also redirected the Kleinian development in British psychoanalysis towards a thoroughly relational objective. Fairbairn thus constructed the first coherent theoretical model of object-relations along three related axes: (i) an original theory of emotional development; (ii) an alternative theory of psychical structuration; and (iii) a revised psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses. 1. Fairbairn posits a process of development characterized by the mode and quality of object- relatedness. Set out in terms of the relational criterion of maturity, the developmental schema comprises three stages: (i) the stage of infantile dependence (which is equivalent to oral dependence), characterized predominantly by an attitude of ‘taking’, which is further subdivided into a pre-ambivalent ‘early oral’ stage (incorporating, sucking or rejecting) and an ambivalent ‘late oral’ stage (incorporating, sucking or biting); (ii) a transitional stage which corresponds to Abraham’s (1924) two ‘anal phases’ and the ‘early genital (phallic) phase’; and (iii) the stage of mature dependence, characterized predominately by an attitude of ‘giving’, where ‘accepted’ and ‘rejected’ objects are exteriorized (1941: 39). 2. Fairbairn’s 1944 paper on ‘endopsychic structure’ elaborates a theory of structuration based on the developmental schema. The infant’s real relationship to the actual mother is characterized as either ‘gratifying’ or ‘non-gratifying’. The criterion of gratification is based
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