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Object Relations

Object-Relations Dyads

When you feel hurt by someone, the hurt never comes alone. It arrives with a picture of yourself (small, overlooked, wronged) and a picture of the other person (careless, cold, superior). Change any one of the three and the experience changes. If the other person were frightened rather than careless, or if you felt annoyed rather than small, it would be a different scene.

Object-relations theory calls this three-part scene a dyad, or an object-relations unit: an image of the self, an image of another person (the “object”), and the feeling that binds them. Otto Kernberg made it the basic building block of the mind. In his account, every significant early experience with another person is stored not as a neutral memory but as one of these units, a self-representation and an object-representation linked by a dominant affect, and these units become the raw material of personality (Kernberg, 1976, 1980).

Everyone carries many dyads. Some are warm (a cared-for self with a loving other, linked by comfort). Some are painful (a helpless self with a cruel other, linked by fear). Most people move through several of them in a single day, usually without noticing. The point of naming them is not to label anyone but to make the scenes visible, because a scene you can see is a scene you are less compelled to repeat.

Core Ideas

Three Parts, One Unit

The dyad has three elements, and none of them makes sense alone:

Kernberg stressed that affect is the glue. Strong feeling, especially in early life, is what organizes experience into these units and gives them their motivational pull. Intensely pleasurable experiences build up “all-good” units; intensely painful ones build up “all-bad” units (Kernberg, 1976). Over time the affects themselves become organized into the broad motivational systems we call love and aggression.

Jacobson’s Foundation

Kernberg built on Edith Jacobson, who described how the infant’s first experience is of fused, undifferentiated self-and-other images. Only gradually, through countless experiences of gratification and frustration, do separate and stable images of self and other form, and only later still do good and bad images of the same person come together into a realistic whole (Jacobson, 1964). Jacobson also emphasized that self-images and object-images are invested with feeling, which is why a shift in how we see someone so often brings a shift in how we see ourselves.

Dyads in TFP

Transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), developed by John Clarkin, Frank Yeomans and Kernberg, made the language of dyads clinical. The therapist listens for the dominant dyad active in the session, names the self, the other, and the affect in plain terms (for example, “a neglected child and an indifferent caretaker, linked by rage”), and watches for when the roles shift (Clarkin, Yeomans, & Kernberg, 2006; Yeomans, Clarkin, & Kernberg, 2015). The same framework has been extended to people with more integrated personalities, where the dyads are subtler and more often defended against than acted out (Caligor, Kernberg, & Clarkin, 2007; Caligor, Kernberg, Clarkin, & Yeomans, 2018).

How Dyads Are Formed, Activated, and Re-Enacted

Internalization

Dyads are not photographs of what happened. They are records of how it was experienced, filtered through the child’s temperament, needs, fantasies and level of development. A brief, ordinary frustration can be recorded as an encounter with a depriving other if the child’s distress was intense enough. Kernberg is explicit that the units reflect both real interactions and the child’s own affective coloring of them (Kernberg, 1976). This is why two siblings raised in the same family can carry very different inner scenes. The processes by which these scenes get inside are described on the page on internal objects.

Activation

Once laid down, a dyad can be switched on by anything that resembles its original setting: a tone of voice, an unanswered message, a person with authority, a moment of need. When a dyad is active, it does not feel like a memory; it feels like an accurate perception of what is happening now. The person who feels belittled by a colleague is not thinking, “an old scene has been activated.” They are thinking, “she is belittling me.” Often there is real provocation in the present as well. The dyad shapes which features of the situation stand out and how strongly they are felt.

Re-Enactment

Dyads do not stay inside. People tend to behave in ways that invite others to play the matching role. Joseph Sandler described this as role-responsiveness: a person nudges the people around them, including the analyst, toward the part their inner scene requires, and the other often finds themselves going along with it before they notice (Sandler, 1976). Someone who expects to be controlled may become so evasive that others start checking up on them. Someone who expects to be abandoned may cling until others pull away. The scene is then confirmed, and the dyad grows stronger. Betty Joseph described the same process in therapy as the “total situation” of the transference, in which the whole relationship, not only what the patient says, carries the old scene (Joseph, 1985). Projective identification is the most intense form of this pull (Ogden, 1979).

Parallel ideas appear across traditions. Harry Stack Sullivan wrote of “personifications” of self and other built up in anxious early interactions (Sullivan, 1953). Mardi Horowitz described role-relationship models, recurring patterns of self, other, and expected transaction (Horowitz, 1991). Lester Luborsky’s core conflictual relationship theme, a wish toward another, the expected response, and the response of the self, captures a dyad in motion (Luborsky & Crits-Christoph, 1990); see core relational themes. Attachment theory’s internal working models are a close cousin (Bowlby, 1969).

Role Reversal: Living Both Sides

One of the most clinically useful ideas in the dyad model is that a person does not only identify with the “self” pole of a scene. Both poles were internalized, so both are available. Under pressure, people switch sides. The person who felt bullied becomes, for a moment, the bully. The child who was neglected becomes the parent who cannot bear a child’s neediness.

TFP calls this role reversal and treats it as central: a patient who has been experiencing the therapist as a cold, controlling critic may suddenly become cold, controlling and critical toward the therapist, while the therapist is left feeling small and scrutinized (Yeomans, Clarkin, & Kernberg, 2015). Heinrich Racker’s account of countertransference anticipated this. He distinguished concordant identifications, in which the therapist feels what the patient feels, from complementary identifications, in which the therapist feels what the patient’s inner other feels (Racker, 1968). Either way, the whole scene is in the room.

Role reversal is not hypocrisy. People usually do not notice the switch, because each pole feels justified from inside. Recognizing it is often the first moment someone realizes that a scene they thought was only done to them is also one they carry and can enact. That recognition is painful, but it is also freeing. It makes the scene something the person owns and can work with, not just a fate.

How Dyads Build Personality and Organization

In Kernberg’s model, personality is built from dyads, and what matters most is not which dyads a person carries but how they are organized. Normal development moves through stages: first undifferentiated self-object images, then differentiated self and object images that are still split into all-good and all-bad, and finally integrated images in which good and bad aspects of the same person are held together (Kernberg, 1976). The ability to integrate in this way is close to what this site calls differentiation and integration.

Integrated Dyads

When dyads are integrated, a person can be furious with their partner and still love them, can feel the boss is unfair today without concluding she is an enemy, and can fail at something without feeling worthless. Kernberg describes this as normal identity: a stable, realistic, nuanced sense of self and of others, which is the hallmark of healthy and neurotic organization (Kernberg, 1975, 1984). Conflict still exists at the neurotic level, but it tends to be between integrated parts of the person, for instance between wanting and forbidding, and it is kept out of awareness mainly by repression.

Split Dyads

When integration fails, the all-good and all-bad units are kept apart, actively, by splitting. Kernberg argued that this is a defense, not just an immaturity: it protects the good images from being destroyed by hatred (Kernberg, 1975). The cost is high. The person’s experience of others and of themselves lurches between extremes, and in each state the other state is hard to remember or believe. Kernberg called the result identity diffusion, and together with primitive defenses and relatively intact reality testing, it defines borderline personality organization (Kernberg, 1975, 1984). Splitting of the self looks the same from the inside: see splitting of self-image.

Kernberg’s emphasis on aggression and constitution is contested. Self psychologists and many relational analysts see split images less as protection against one’s own hate and more as the residue of real failures of care, and they put more weight on repair than on interpretation. Attachment researchers add that disorganized early attachment may leave people with multiple, incompatible models of the same caregiver. These views overlap more than they compete: in practice, clinicians of many schools see the same switching scenes, and differ mainly in how they explain and approach them.

Narcissistic Dynamics: When the Polarity Flips

Narcissistic dynamics show the dyad model at its clearest, because the same relationship can carry opposite charges at different times. Readers new to the style may want to start with the narcissistic personality style page.

The Idealizing Phase

At the start, a new partner, mentor, employer, or friend may be experienced through a glowing dyad: an exceptional self joined with an exceptional other, linked by admiration and excitement. The other is idealized, and the self borrows the shine. Alternatively, the other is cast as an admiring audience to an idealized self (idealization of self-image). In both versions the feeling is warm, but the warmth depends on the other staying perfect, or staying admiring.

Kernberg described the structure underneath as a pathological grandiose self: a fusion of the real self, the ideal self, and an ideal image of the other, which allows the person to avoid depending on anyone real (Kernberg, 1975). Kohut, from a different angle, saw idealizing and mirroring needs as normal developmental needs that went unmet and remain urgent (Kohut, 1971; see selfobjects). Both describe the same visible pattern: the other is valued for the function they serve.

The Flip

Then something punctures the scene. The idealized other shows a flaw, is unavailable, disagrees, or simply fails to admire on cue. Because the warm dyad depended on perfection, a small injury can be felt as a large betrayal. The dyad does not soften; it changes sign. The same person is now experienced through a cold or hostile unit: a superior self and a contemptible other, linked by scorn (devaluation), or, just as often, a humiliated self and a contemptuous other, linked by shame and rage.

What makes this splitting rather than ordinary disappointment is the loss of the earlier picture. In the devaluing phase, the admired qualities are not weighed against the flaws; they seem to vanish, or are retold as having been fake all along. Envy can sharpen the flip. As Herbert Rosenfeld and Kernberg each described, the goodness of someone one depends on can itself feel humiliating, so spoiling it brings relief (Rosenfeld, 1971; Kernberg, 1975).

The Self Flips Too

Because each dyad has two poles, the self-image swings along with the image of the other. In the idealizing phase, the person may feel special and alive. In the aftermath of a puncture, they may fall into a depleted state, feeling worthless, empty, and exposed (devaluation of self-image), and may then restore themselves by devaluing the person who caused the injury. Clinicians often see the cycle repeat: idealize, feel let down, devalue, withdraw, find a new ideal.

A Composite Vignette

Daniel, a composite drawn from common clinical descriptions, joins a startup and talks for weeks about the founder: visionary, brilliant, the first leader who “really sees” him. In those conversations he describes himself as energized and finally recognized. Two months in, the founder gives a promotion to someone else. Daniel’s account changes overnight: the founder is now a fraud who surrounds himself with flatterers, and Daniel is the only one honest enough to see it. Some days he speaks with contempt; on others he feels like a failure who was never good enough. What has not appeared, in either phase, is a founder who is gifted and limited, or a Daniel who is talented and disappointed. Seeing the flip, without judgment, is often what lets that more complicated, more bearable picture form.

Other Examples

Emotional Dysregulation and Borderline Dynamics

In emotionally dysregulated dynamics, the central dyads often concern closeness and abandonment. Commonly described pairs include a needy, helpless self with an ideal, all-giving caretaker, linked by longing and relief, and an abandoned self with a cold, rejecting other, linked by panic and rage (Clarkin, Yeomans, & Kernberg, 2006). The switch can happen within hours: a partner who comes home late moves from “the only person who understands me” to “someone who doesn’t care whether I live or die.” Role reversal is common too. The person who felt abandoned may then cut off contact, leaving the partner to feel what they felt. Mentalization-based approaches describe the same moments as a collapse in the capacity to keep the other’s mind in view under stress (Bateman & Fonagy, 2004; see mentalization).

A composite vignette. Maya texts a close friend and hears nothing for a day. Her thoughts move from worry (“maybe she’s sick”) to certainty (“she’s done with me, everyone eventually is”) to fury. When the friend replies warmly the next morning, Maya feels flooded with relief, then ashamed of the night before. The scene that took her over, an abandoned self and an indifferent other, felt like a fact at the time. Naming it as a scene, one she has lived many times, gives her some distance from it next time.

Paranoid Dynamics

In paranoid dynamics the dominant dyad is a persecuted self and a hostile, attacking or humiliating other, linked by fear and suspicion. Through projection, aggression that cannot be owned is located in others, who then seem dangerous (McWilliams, 2011). Role reversal is often hidden here: the person feels purely defensive, yet their preemptive accusations or vigilance can make them the attacker in someone else’s eyes, and others respond with the very hostility that was expected.

A composite vignette. Sam, a manager, is convinced a new team member is angling for his job. He starts reviewing her work more harshly and excluding her from meetings. She grows guarded and complains to HR, which Sam takes as proof. Seen as a dyad, Sam began in the threatened-self role and slid, without noticing, into the role of the threatening other.

Dyads in Transference

Because dyads are re-enacted with whoever is present, they reliably appear in therapy. Transference, in this model, is the activation of a dyad in the relationship with the therapist: the therapist is experienced as the critical parent, the abandoning partner, or the idealized rescuer, and the patient experiences themselves in the matching role. TFP makes this the main focus of treatment, on the view that a scene lived out in the room, with feeling, is more available for understanding than one recounted from last week (Yeomans, Clarkin, & Kernberg, 2015). The therapist names the dyad, notices role reversals, and gradually links the split-apart good and bad scenes, so the person can experience them as belonging to one relationship, and one self.

Other schools work with the same material differently. Self psychologists attend to the selfobject needs the scene expresses. Relational analysts emphasize the therapist’s own participation in the enactment and the value of working through it together. Researchers following Safran and Muran show how ruptures in the working alliance often carry the patient’s central dyad, and how repairing them can revise it (see rupture and repair).

How Dyads Differ From Look-Alikes

History

The dyad idea grew in stages. Freud showed that lost attachments are taken into the self (Freud, 1917). Klein described an inner world of good and bad objects held apart by splitting and linked to the self by intense feeling (Klein, 1946). Fairbairn described the psyche as a set of split-off ego and object pairs, each bound by a particular affect (Fairbairn, 1944). Jacobson charted how self- and object-images develop and become invested with feeling (Jacobson, 1964). Kernberg then joined these lines into the explicit triad of self-representation, object-representation, and affect, and used it to build a developmental model and a classification of personality organization (Kernberg, 1975, 1976). From the 1990s, Clarkin, Yeomans and Kernberg turned the model into a manualized treatment, transference-focused psychotherapy, and later extended it to higher-level personality difficulties (Clarkin, Yeomans, & Kernberg, 2006; Caligor et al., 2018).

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