Object relations

Object relations theory is a division o f psychoanalytic theorising that has a central role in British psychoanalysis (Segal, 1973). This theory places more emphasis on interpersonal relationships, and stresses the infant’s relationship with the mother during the early stage of development.

Klein believed that infants begin life with an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety they experience as a consequence o f the clash between the life instinct and the death instinct. According to Klein, from the beginning o f the infant’s life it experiences the world with intolerable anxieties, and Klein infers that this is related to the infant’s own death instincts. These ‘persecutory’ anxieties are felt in the infant’s own bodily needs, as well as by the external frustration experienced with regard to those needs that are overwhelming to the infant. For the infant to be able to overcome these anxieties, the infant applies defenses - introjection, projection, splitting and projective identification - to protect against anxiety. The infant relates to the external world by deploying defense mechanisms to protect the ego from the destructiveness o f the death drive.

The earliest object relations o f the child are relations with images o f body parts, that is, breast, penis, the womb, etc., which operate as ‘universal mechanisms’ (Klein, 1932, p.

122

images o f objects take in aspects o f the real objects they represent in the world later in the child’s life. Klein further extended the principle o f a priori images o f objects to whole objects.

The main presupposition of object relations is it’s ‘focus on the interactions with others, that is, on the problems o f object relations’ (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983, p. 2).

‘Objects’ in psychoanalysis refers to people, in particular the mother, and focuses on relationships between people. Ramon Ganzarian writes:

It [object relations] focuses on the internal fantasied world of psychic reality, more specifically on the exchanges between the self and the internal images of others, or mental residues of their relations with the self. These mental

representations o f others - often called ‘ internal objects’ — can trigger behavioural responses, as if they were either persecutors (‘bad’ objects) or sources o f security (‘good’ objects) (2007, p. 97).

Ganzarairi’s description of object relations reveals the significance o f ‘phantasised’ ‘internal’ and ‘external’ ‘objects’. This idea was central to Klein’s concepts. Klein postulated that children develop parallel phantasies concerning their own insides, a place similar to their mother’s interior, which is populated by body parts, substances, people, etc. She argued that phantasies of internal presence begin in the first months o f life. In developing her theory, she postulated that representations of all experiences and relations

with significant others also become internalised, in an effort to preserve and protect them. This leads to the development o f complex sets of internalised object relations, phantasies and anxieties in relation to the state o f an individual’s behaviour, mood and sense o f self in adulthood. From a psychoanalytic perspective, phantasy (with a ‘ph’) is dominated by unconscious processes, thus deviating from fantasies that are conscious and relate to ‘a fanciful mental image, typically one in which a person often dwells and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes’ (Oxford Dictionary, 2010).

Object relations theory puts forward the notion that we are driven to form relationships with others. From a Kleinian perspective this makes us vulnerable, because we become dependent on the objects; we need them; we cannot control them; we love them and hate them; we become angry and want to destroy them, and then feel guilty and want to make amends (Likierman, 2002). We also recognise that they are not us; they are different to us, but nevertheless there are similarities. In applying this theory, I intend to provide an insight into how we (black women) relate to people who are not us, and how we imagine people relating to us who think we are not them, that is, white people’s perception of black people. I am using Klein’s notion o f phantasy because it is used in organisational psychodynamics theory. What is o f particular interest is how phantasy influences people’s experiences, perceptions and portrayal o f their everyday lives. The main focus here is to explore how object relations theory will be used to address the following research question: what mechanisms do black women deploy to help them negotiate working in a white, male-dominated organisation? I am particularly interested in exploring the psychosocial experience; by this I am referring to the external Social

124

experience, that is, the relational dynamics that occur within institutions at individual, group and organisational levels, as well as the internal experience, whereby I am referring to internal life. I will take into account the idea that phantasy can influence the behaviour and experience of individuals, and use this concept to gain a different angle of black women’s experience. Here, I am talking about how it ‘feels’ to be an employee, rather than what it is ‘like’ to be an employee. This means analysing the phantasy world of the participants as well as their external world of the organisation, and highlighting the merger of these two worlds in their narratives. I refer to Juliet Mitchell to elaborate my point further:

Phantasy emanates from within and imagines what it is without, it offers an unconscious commentary [...] through its ability to phantasise the baby tests out, prim itively‘thinks’ about, its experience of inside and outside (1986, p. 23).

Mitchell is alluding to the intermingling of the psychic world and the external reality, and thus the perceived reality o f the individual . She is also articulating a Kleinian perspective o f phantasy by highlighting its origin; that is, she makes reference to the fact that

phantasy stems from the young infant’s mental life, which is a constellation formed by the interaction with the external world and external objects, and the internal world. This indicates that the unconscious phantasy is immersed with ‘internal’ objects. Klein explains that the ‘internal’ or ‘inner’ (these terms are used interchangeably) world refers to the deep unconscious phantasies experienced in the mind o f the young infant. This

inner world corresponds with the actual experiences and impressions gained from people in the external world (Klein, 1940). The infant uses the experiences from its interaction with external objects - the mother - to reinforce and validate the unconscious,

phantasised world. The ‘external’ world contains external objects and includes conscious interactions with these objects. Klein postulates that the infant creates two worlds: an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’ world. In both worlds the objects are duplicates o f each other. However, there is a distinction between ‘real’ / external mother / external object and phantasised internal mother / internal object, which means there is an external mother and an internal mother; every object is duplicated. Objects live and die; they are real in both . worlds. Julia Segal writes:

in these phantasies, people and parts o f people live and die inside and outside the self; move around; give rise to enormous gratification and equally enormous fear, jealousy, or envy; are pushed from one person to another, regardless o f behaviour

(1992, p. 31).

This implies that there is a continuous interaction between the internal world and the external world, experienced mainly as visceral sensations and urges (Isaacs, 1952), which leads to anxiety that needs to be defended against.

126

In the following sections, I will outline the four defense mechanisms that are initiated to protect the individual from anxiety and that are central to understanding Klein’s work. They are: splitting, introjection, projection and projective identification.

Splitting

Klein’s work described how the infant interacts with objects by splitting the object into good or bad. She believed that infants perceive all objects as either good or bad, and used the mother’s breast as a means to describe this phenomenon. (It is worth noting here that Klein was not necessarily referring to. the actual breast but to the feeding object.) Hence, splitting is a mental process by which two separate and contradictory versions of reality can co-exist. This defense mechanism can be viewed as the first defense mechanism in a series o f other defenses. Splitting in phantasy helps the infant to distinguish between good and bad (Segal, 2004). This process enables the child to make sense of the world and o f its own experiences. For example, the infant phantasises about a ‘good’ breast which is nourishing, loving and comforting, but when the child is hungry the hunger is experienced as an attack by a ‘bad’ breast.

Introjection and projection

Introjection and projection describe unconscious actions. Perhaps they are the most fundamental of the defense mechanisms as they are two concepts that are interwoven in Klein’s object relations theory. They are concepts used to describe how the infant’s

psychic development occurs, how the infant makes sense o f its external world, and how the infant interacts with its internal and external world (Hinshelwood, 1991 [1989]; Segal, 1973; Klein, 1932). They are not discrete concepts, and they underpin object relations theory in two ways. First they show how the infant develops relations with its objects (both part and whole objects) and second they are defense mechanisms against anxiety. The object that is split in this way is the internal object. The ego introjects external objects that are the source o f pleasure and expels outside o f itself that which causes displeasure. In simple terms, the child’s phantasies introject parts o f his or her parents’ bodies (the breast, the penis, etc.), and the parents are split into gratifying good objects and frustrating bad objects. Projection, on the other hand, is based on an unconscious phantasy of expulsion, o f ‘getting rid o f destructive feelings directed ‘on to ’ the object that threatened the relation with the object.

Projective identification

Projective identification follows on from introjection and projection. That is, the ego develops through its interactions with the external world by introjecting objects,

perceiving its value, making judgements, then deciding whether to incorporate it into the self or to project it back into the external world. This is an unconscious process and happens without the individual being aware o f the process. Aspects of the self are projected into an external object, subtly pressuring the object to behave in ways that conform to the projection. Thus, parts of the self are felt to reside inside the object and

128

may include anxieties o f being trapped, phantasies o f controlling the object from within, or o f evacuating what is deemed undesirable.

In the next section, I will refer to Klein’s notion o f ‘positions’ and introduce two of her most influential formulations: the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position.