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III. B. The Unconscious in ‘British’ Object Relations Theory (Klein, Bion, Winnicott)
Object Relations Theory is a major post-Freudian development spawned in England and in France. The object relations theory develops a concept of the unconscious which is no longer founded on the rather solipsistic Freudian energetic model of the drive and the process of repression but on a relational model of the mind. The various theoretical concepts stemming from the Object Relations School describe the Unconscious as a system that develops and is shaped within a relationship . Object Relations theory focuses on the role of the object conceived as the product of the internalisation of the relational experiences that the individual has had from the early stages of his/her life. From this perspective, there is a meeting point between the intrapsychical and the intersubjective domains , relational events and unconscious mental functions. The innate drive endowment of the baby is thus shaped by interactions with the environment, which in their turn, are coloured and remodelled by unconscious psychical processes. Though he remained relatively unknown during his lifetime, ‘the man who un-split the psychic atom’ (Malberg & Raphael-Leff, 2014), W. R. D. Fairbairn (1952) is widely considered one of the early theoretical innovators in this area. Better known and more influential for decades has been the work of Melanie Klein who straddles a purely intrapsychic perspective and an intersubjective one. The unconscious for Klein is characterized by the defence mechanisms of the infant who is pushed to get rid of the sadistic and anxiety ridden parts of the self – dominated by the death drive – through the unconscious processes of splitting and projective identification . To this are added denial and idealisation defences. The concept of the unconscious as a product of primal repression proposed by Freud does not fit into the Kleinian concept of unconscious (Mancia, 2007). In Kleinian theory, the inner life of the individual is founded on unconscious phantasy and is governed by the schizo-paranoid and depressive positions (PSP-DP) (Klein, 1935). These are intra-psychical ways of functioning which reflect the way in which the person relates to his/her own internal objects and which deeply influence his/her way of relating to the people in the external world. The original Kleinian concept of projective identification has become more and more relationally oriented, thus evolving, in the Bionian theoretical model, into a particular form of communication and an unconscious request for containment and rêverie. In the unconscious mental functioning of alpha function, described by Bion (1962, 1965), one can see how the Unconscious develops within a relational context: the conscious and unconscious mind of the baby is structured through the maternal rêverie function, a crucial element in the organisation of the infant’s unconscious life. Before the emergence of repression, the unconscious is molded through a transformative facilitation by the parent’s mind of sensory and emotional experiences which reach the infant in the domain of primary relations. All regions and psychoanalytic cultures have been influenced by the central Kleinian concept of ’ unconscious phantasy’. The spelling of phantasy with a “ph” instead of an ”f” emphasizes that this term refers to a basic form of psychic structure with specific ideational content, rather than simply the storyline of an elaborated wish based on drive derivatives or a day dream. The theoretical basis for seeing the mind as organized by and
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