Playing with Fairbairn’s Metapsychology
I have, of late, been revisiting some papers of Ronald Fairbairn’s, in anticipation of a presentation I will be doing with a reading group I participate in. Of all the theorists whose work I’ve come by, Fairbairn’s by far offers the most complex metapsychological framework, developing an entire endopsychic structure unlike anything in other psychoanalytic work. This structure frequently comes under scrutiny for its limitations. Though, as with all such things, limitations are to be expected, and what it does offer is a rich metaphorical framework for understanding something about the human experience.
Within his papers, and in papers by others attempting to explain this metapsychology, Fairbairn offers the following diagram to represent the underlying structural elements of the endopsychic structure he is attempting to describe:
It’s a complicated image, even before one takes it out of context. My only interest in sharing it here, is to show the kind of games that Fairbairn can get up to in some of his papers. Though incredibly dry when rendered this way, the above in fact is a graphical representation of one of the most cogent answers to the question that plagues all theories of human psychology, namely “why are people so prone to repeatedly engaging in behaviors that seem not to be in their best interest or which are, in fact, even painful?” It is a relational model for understanding the repetition compulsion.
Fairbairn’s first point of order is to point out that this model is one that operates a level below that of the Freudian id, ego, superego model. Fairbairn’s clinical work led him to the belief that Freud’s topography was insufficient for explaining the types of problems Fairbairn was observing in his own client population. Notably, Fairbairn felt that the Freudian structure was too dependent on guilt as an orienting affective principle, believing this to be a developmentally later phenomenon than the schizoid-level relational problems that seemed to be the basis for (by Fairbairn’s estimation) most problems in psychopathology. Fairbairn’s belief was that psychopathology was less about repressed drive and more about disruptions in object-relations (that is disruptions in patterns of being able to give and receive love), which was a more fundamental organizing principle that occurred at a level before the kind of subject-object differentiation necessary for Oedipal organizations and conflict.
The CE in the above image stands for the central ego, which for Fairbairn seems to be something like the observing ego of the adult. It is the “I” or “me” that mediates the split off ego functions and later object-relations in the real world. On the left is the Internal Saboteur (IS) and Rejecting Object (RO). On the right are the Libidinal Ego (LE) and Exciting Object (EO).
Conceptually, I believe, there is a trick to reading this diagram which took me a while to identify, which is to read it from the bottom-up rather than top-down. Though I can understand why Fairbairn structured this image in the way he did, in reality there is no coherent way to structure the image, given what it represents is so amorphous. But, to me, the internalized rejecting and exciting object are what make this conceptually work, and so to understand how this structure gets organized I’d like to start there.
The rejecting object and exciting object are the internalized object relationships which, for Fairbairn, develop in the interaction with the unsatisfying love relationship with the maternal object (as always with early psychoanalytic frameworks, it is important to hold some space for the primacy of the maternal relationship while also recognizing that these kind of endopsychic structures can be born out of all kinds of relationships with various external objects). Note that neither one of these is a desirable relational experience for the infant. The rejecting mother is just as one would suspect, leaving the child feeling wounded and abandoned. The exciting object, though on the surface potentially desirable, is actually meant to represent something like an experience where the child feels as though they are a tantalized object of the parent’s interest, something like a narcissistic identification serving the parent’s needs more than the child’s. This is not exciting in a sense of leaving one satisfied. Rather, it carries more of a tenor of being overstimulated or consumed and then discarded. R.D. Laing would later articulate this dynamic far more effectively in his book The Divided Self.
These internal objects lead to the dynamic processes observed in the split ego functions of the internal saboteur and the libidinal ego. The libidinal ego, per Fairbairn, is something like Freud’s id, though differs in that it is less drive-oriented, and far more relationally determined. It is the transference relationship that seeks out love and connection. However, this ego and the exciting object are always subject to the aggressive impulses of the internal saboteur, the ego function built out of the rejecting object, which always knows that the love object will never provide what we need (as it is more interested in what it needs) and that any love received from the external object will always be unsatisfactory and will ultimately leave us feeling vulnerable and rejected all over again.
These dynamics then lead to object-seeking behaviors which reinforce the unsatisfying love relationships to which we have already been exposed. These are Fairbairn’s “archaic allegiances” as defined by Mitchell in his writing on Fairbairn. This process can play out in different ways, whether it is via experiencing the object as what we desire them to be, being so forceful in our desire for a kind of object that we compel them to engage in the behaviors we expect/desire of them, or simply picking bad objects that possess the same set of rejecting and enticing behaviors we’ve already experienced. I would also add, although these are the three approaches most often seen in the literature, I think there is something to be said for the fact that even a “healthy” or “emotionally advanced” partner is going to fail us at times, meaning that, inevitably, we will at some point be able to find the disappointment/rage/disgust/empathic failure we are seeking in any relationship.
Martha Stark has an interesting lecture on YouTube where she uses these concepts to explore the “relentlessness of hope” and the “refusal to grieve” of the client/analysand. These are variations on other things I’ve shared in the space, though I think are concepts that are hard to come by online or in some bodies of literature, and so wanted to highlight Stark’s video as a unique piece of educational material that is fairly easy to track down. Stark observes that one reason, and perhaps the primary reason, why these relational patterns continue to play out, is due to an attachment to the idea that we may someday get what we need from our objects. We develop these initial attachments and internalized objects as a form of relationship maintenance that lets the bad object off the hook and opens space for the possibility that they might eventually provide for us exactly that which we are aware they are incapable of. This process then gets repeatedly reenacted in other relationships through various relational defenses. This relentlessness becomes a kind of masochistic holding out, punishing ourselves and our love relationships repeatedly for their inability to heal the wounds of our early attachments.
The only real solution to this process, as I’ve posited in other posts, is grief. Mourning and letting go of our attachments become the only vehicles whereby the real relationships in our life will be granted the ability to be whatever it is they actually already are. What is notable in Stark’s rendering, is her insistence that there needs to be some maneuver of accountability in the therapist before the client will be able to take their own accountability and relinquish their relentless tendencies. Stark sees this accountability as one directed towards the therapist’s seductiveness; adherence to a particular idea or perspective; or a mistake in judgement. It is the acknowledgement of the fact that we did find ourselves, not simply playing the role of, but being a bad object. This can be a hard point to take up, but—as Stark indicates—not to do so can be “crazy-making” for the client. It puts them right back in the position of needing to internalize and take responsibility for the structural failures in the relationship itself. The purpose, as it sometimes seems in bad therapy, is not to get the client to take ownership of the failures in the therapeutic relationship, but for client and therapist both to hold space for the impossibility of what it means to be in relationship and the inevitable disappointments and ruptures that can be anticipated in all relating. Insight is helpful, but it can only get us so far. In a therapy that is sufficiently long enough, the therapist will have to give the client experientially that which they never had: a love object that can empathically attune to and admit their failures.
I think this can be a hard thing for certain therapists to be open to. Admittedly, I can understand why. Many schools of thought around therapy see it as a unilateral act of bequeathing knowledge or insight. They fail to acknowledge the nature of relational negotiation and reciprocity that is fundamental to the process. Stark has an interesting conceptual framework for a spectrum of one- to two-person structures for understanding interpretation (which may be a post for another day) that accounts for ways to slide between different modes of what she calls “therapeutic action”. If we are willing to trust that accounts of the human experience like Fairbairn’s framework, though not necessarily literal or absolute, offer something by the way of a structural metaphor for conceptualizing some very real component of the kind of relational shortcomings that lead to the difficulties we all are susceptible to experiencing in the world, than we must also trust that some amount of therapeutic repair and attention must be placed on the relationship itself, beyond the realm of pure interpretation or didactic edification.
