Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality

Since publication of this volume in 1952, W. R. D. Fairbairn’s focus on object relations has re-oriented psychoanalysis by placing the child’s need for relationships at the centre of development. His object relations theory elaborated a model of psychic structure built upon the internalization and modification of experience with parents and other people of central importance to the child, and showed how the self or ego handles the dissatisfactions inevitable in all relationships through internalization of the object, followed by ego splitting and repression of painful internal object relations.