GeistHaus

Object Relations

Internal Objects

Most people know the experience of a voice in their head that sounds a lot like someone else. A teacher’s impatience surfaces when you make a mistake. A grandmother’s calm comes back when you are frightened. You may not hear actual words, but you feel the presence: a figure who judges, soothes, tempts, or turns away.

Psychoanalysts call these figures internal objects. An internal object is the lasting inner trace of an important person, or of one aspect of that person, as they were experienced, not necessarily as they were. These figures carry feeling, act on us from within, and take part in an inner drama that colors how we treat ourselves and what we expect from others. Thomas Ogden described internal object relations as relationships between split-off parts of the self, each identified with a self or an object role, which can feel and act like separate agencies inside one mind (Ogden, 1983).

Everyone has internal objects. They are not a sign that something is wrong; they are how human beings carry their relationships with them. What varies is their tone (more loving or more punishing), how well they are integrated, and how much room they leave for new experience.

How People Get Inside: Internalization

Internalization is the general name for the processes by which outer relationships become inner structure. Roy Schafer and William Meissner both argued that the term covers several different processes, which are often confused, and that it helps to keep them apart (Schafer, 1968; Meissner, 1981). They can be pictured as a spectrum, from the most primitive and global to the most selective and mature.

Incorporation

At the most primitive end, incorporation is the fantasy of taking the other bodily inside, by swallowing or merging. It belongs to the earliest modes of experience, when inside and outside are still blurred, and shows up in adult life in dreams, in some psychotic states, and in feelings such as being “filled up” by someone’s love or “poisoned” by their words (Schafer, 1968).

Introjection

In introjection, the other is taken in as an inner presence that remains felt as other: a voice or figure the self relates to. Schafer described introjects as inner presences with which one has a continuing relationship (Schafer, 1968). The harsh inner critic who speaks to you in the second person (“you idiot”) is a classic introject. Freud’s observation that a mourner can take the lost person in, so that reproaches meant for them are aimed at oneself, is the founding example (Freud, 1917).

Identification

In identification, qualities of the other become part of the self. Instead of hearing a parent’s patience, you are patient. Identification is more selective and more integrated; it changes who you are, not just whom you hear. Freud proposed that character itself is built up in this way, as “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes”, that is, of past attachments given up and replaced by becoming like the person (Freud, 1923). The broader topic has its own page: identification.

The Representational World

Joseph Sandler and Bernard Rosenblatt offered a calmer, more cognitive frame. They proposed that the mind builds a representational world: an organized set of images of self and others, built from experience, against which new experience is perceived and judged (Sandler & Rosenblatt, 1962). In this view internal objects are not little people living inside us but representations that guide perception, expectation, and feeling. Many contemporary writers combine both views: the representations are the structure, and the felt sense of an inner figure is how they are experienced when charged with feeling.

Good Objects and Bad Objects

Melanie Klein populated the inner world with good and bad objects. A good object is felt as loving, nourishing and protective; a bad object as depriving, persecuting or attacking. In early life, she argued, the infant keeps them strictly apart, which protects the good from the bad (Klein, 1946). The secure presence of a good internal object, in her view, is the foundation of emotional stability and of the capacity to love (Klein, 1957).

Part-Objects and Whole Objects

Klein also distinguished part-objects from whole objects. In the earliest states, the other is experienced only through the function that matters in the moment: a gratifying breast, a frustrating breast, a soothing voice. These part-objects are not yet a person. Only gradually does the infant come to recognize that the same whole person both satisfies and frustrates, an achievement that marks what she called the depressive position (Klein, 1935; see the positions). Adults slip back into part-object relating often, for instance when someone matters to us only as a source of approval, sex, money, or reassurance, and not as a person with their own life.

Fairbairn’s Endopsychic Structure

W. R. D. Fairbairn built the most detailed model of internal objects. He proposed that a child cannot afford to see the parents it depends on as bad. Instead it takes the bad aspects of the relationship inside, where it can try to control them, leaving the outer parents good enough to depend on. He called this the moral defense: the child would rather feel itself bad, in a world ruled by good parents, than feel itself good in a world ruled by bad ones (Fairbairn, 1952).

Inside, Fairbairn argued, the unsatisfying parent is split into two internal objects, each tied to a split-off part of the ego (Fairbairn, 1944):

The internal saboteur is one of Fairbairn’s most enduring insights. It is the inner voice that sneers at your own longing (“you’re pathetic for wanting that”), allied with the rejecting object against the hopeful, needy part of you. Fairbairn thought people stay loyal to these bad internal objects because they are the only objects they had, and letting them go feels like losing the relationship altogether (Fairbairn, 1952). Harry Guntrip extended this picture, describing a further, deeply withdrawn part of the self that has given up on objects entirely (Guntrip, 1969). John Sutherland’s biography and synthesis remains a clear guide to Fairbairn’s system (Sutherland, 1989).

Winnicott and Object Usage

Donald Winnicott shifted attention from the objects inside to the real people outside, and to how a person comes to experience others as real. In “The Use of an Object” he distinguished relating to an object, which can remain inside one’s own omnipotent control, from using it, which requires that the other be recognized as existing outside oneself. He argued that this recognition comes about paradoxically: the child, in fantasy, destroys the object, and the object survives, without retaliating or collapsing. Its survival is what makes it real (Winnicott, 1969). The idea has been central to relational analysts such as Jessica Benjamin, who builds on it in her account of mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988).

For understanding internal objects, Winnicott’s point is that the inner world is not sealed off. New relationships that survive our anger, envy and need can gradually revise the figures inside. Winnicott also described the transitional object, the teddy bear or blanket that is neither fully inside nor fully outside, as the first step toward a world shared with others (Winnicott, 1953).

The Inner Critic and the Inner Comforter

Internal objects are most easy to feel in the way people talk to themselves.

The Inner Critic

A harsh inner critic is often an introject: a punishing figure whose voice was taken in and now speaks from inside. Freud tied the superego to identification with parental authority (Freud, 1923). Klein added that early superego figures are often far harsher than the real parents, because they are also colored by the child’s own projected aggression (Klein, 1935). Fairbairn’s internal saboteur captures a specific form: the critic that attacks need itself. Schema therapy describes a closely related “punitive” or “demanding” parent mode (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar, 2003). In daily life, the inner critic shows up as automatic self-attack after a mistake, contempt for one’s own feelings, or the conviction that rest must be earned. See also internal standards and ideals and shame and guilt.

The Inner Comforter

The good internal object is quieter but just as real. It is the felt sense that someone is on your side even when you are alone: the capacity to soothe yourself, to forgive a mistake, to wait through distress. Winnicott linked the capacity to be alone to having once been alone in the presence of a reliable other (Winnicott, 1958). Mahler’s object constancy describes a stable, comforting inner image of a caregiver that survives absence and anger (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). Kohut described how the soothing functions of others are gradually taken over by the self (Kohut, 1971; see selfobjects). This is part of what this site calls affect regulation and self-esteem regulation.

Examples

The Voice After a Mistake

Priya, a composite, sends an email with a typo to a senior client. Before she can think, a voice says: “Of course. Careless, like always.” She notices the phrase is her father’s, word for word. The voice is an introject, felt as a presence acting on her, not as her own considered judgment. Recognizing that it is a voice, and whose, is often the first step in answering it.

The Exciting Object

Tom, a composite, keeps falling for people who are warm one week and gone the next. Each time, he feels sure that this time the closeness will finally last. In Fairbairn’s terms, he is in the grip of an exciting object: a promise that keeps hope alive precisely because it is never fulfilled. Steady, available partners feel oddly flat to him.

The Borrowed Calm

Ana, a composite, panics before a medical test. She remembers, without trying, her aunt’s hand on her back during a childhood illness and the phrase “we’ll see what we see.” Her breathing slows. A good internal object is at work: a remembered presence turned into a capacity of her own.

How Different Thinkers See It

The schools differ on what internal objects are. For Klein, they are phantasy figures shaped heavily by the child’s own love and hate. For Fairbairn, they are internalized traces of real unsatisfying relationships. For Sandler and much of contemporary cognitive-affective theory, they are representations, more like maps than inhabitants. Relational analysts tend to stress that inner objects are continually reshaped by present relationships. Attachment theory’s internal working models describe overlapping territory in the language of expectation and strategy (Bowlby, 1969). These are differences of emphasis more than outright contradiction, and many clinicians move among them.

History

Freud laid the groundwork in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and The Ego and the Id (1923), showing that lost others are taken into the self and that the superego is built from identifications. Karl Abraham elaborated incorporation and introjection in his studies of mourning and depression. Klein, from the 1930s, made the inner world of good and bad objects the center of psychoanalysis (Klein, 1935, 1946). Fairbairn, in papers collected in 1952, built the first systematic model of internal object structure. In the United States, Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962), Jacobson (1964), Schafer (1968) and Meissner (1981) clarified the concepts in more representational and developmental terms, and Kernberg (1976) folded them into his model of object-relations units. Ogden (1983) reconsidered the concept as relationships between split-off parts of the self.

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