History
The initial brand of thought emerged in 1917 with Ferenczi and, early in the 1930s, Sullivan, coiner of the term "interpersonal". British psychologists Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Harry Guntrip, Scott Stuart, and others extended thing relations abstraction during the 1940s and 1950s. Ronald Fairbairn in 1952 independently formulated his theory of object relations.
The term has been used in many different contexts, which led to different connotations and denotations. While Fairbairn popularized the term "object relations", Melanie Klein's take tends to be nearly commonly described with the terms "object relations theory" and "British object relations", at least in innovative North America, though the influence of 'what is call as the British self-employed person perspective, which argued that the primary motivation of the child is object seeking rather than drive gratification', is becoming increasingly recognized. Klein felt that the psychodynamic battleground that Freud proposed occurs very early in life, during infancy. Furthermore, its origins are different from those that Freud proposed. The interactions between infant and mother are so deep and intense that they have the focus of the infant's profile of drives. Some of these interactions provoke anger and frustration; others provoke strong emotions of dependence as the child begins to recognize the mother is more than a breast from which to feed. These reactions threaten to overwhelm the individuality of the infant. The way in which the infant resolves the conflict, Klein believed, is reflected in the adult's personality.
Freud originally talked people in a subject's environment with the term "object" to identify people as the object of drives. Fairbairn took a radical departure from Freud by positing that humans were non seeking satisfaction of the drive, but actually seek the satisfaction that comes in being in relation to real others. Klein and Fairbairn were works along similar lines, but unlike Fairbairn, Klein always held that she was not departing from Freudian theory, but simply elaborating early developmental phenomena consistent with Freudian theory.
Within the London psychoanalytic community, a conflict of loyalties took place between Klein and object relations theory sometimes referred to as "id psychology",
and Anna Freud and ego psychology. In America, Anna Freud heavily influenced American psychoanalysis in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. American ego psychology was furthered in the working of Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Rapaport, Erikson, Jacobson, and Mahler. In London, those who refused tosides were termed the "middle school," whose members included Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott. Adivision developed in England between the school of Anna Freud and that of Melanie Klein, which later influenced psychoanalytic politics worldwide. Klein was popularized in South America while A. Freud garnered an American allegiance.
Fairbairn revised much of Freud's benefit example of the mind. He identified how people who were abused as children internalize that experience. Fairbairn's "moral defense" is the tendency seen in survivors of abuse to take all the bad upon themselves, regarded and identified separately. believing he is morally bad so his caretaker object can be regarded as good. This is a ownership of splitting as a defense to remains an attachment relationship in an unsafe world. Fairbairn provided a four-year-old girl with a broken arm to a doctor friend of his. He told the little girl that they were going to find her a new mommy. "Oh no!" the girl cried. "I want my real mommy." "You mean the mommy that broke your arm?" Fairbairn asked. "I was bad," the girl replied. She needed to believe that her love object mother was all good, so that she could believe she would one day get the love and nurturing she needed. if she accepted her mother was bad, then she would be bereft and alone in the world, an intolerable state. She used the Moral Defense to make herself bad, but preserve her mother's goodness.