A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OFOBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY

THOMAS H. OGDEN306 Laurel Street, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA

(Final version accepted 12 March 2002)

The author presents a reading of Freud’s ‘Mourning and melancholia’ in which heexamines not only the ideas Freud was introducing, but, as important, the way he wasthinking/writing in this watershed paper. The author demonstrates how Freud made useof his exploration of the unconscious work of mourning and of melancholia to proposeand explore some of the major tenets of a revised model of the mind (which later wouldbe termed ‘object-relations theory’). The principal tenets of the revised modelpresented in this 1917 paper include: (1) the idea that the unconscious is organised to asigni�cant degree around stable internal object relations between paired split-off partsof the ego; (2) the notion that psychic pain may be defended against by means of thereplacement of an external object relationship by an unconscious, fantasied internalobject relationship; (3) the idea that pathological bonds of love mixed with hate areamong the strongest ties that bind internal objects to one another in a state of mutualcaptivity; (4) the notion that the psychopathology of internal object relations ofteninvolves the use of omnipotent thinking to a degree that cuts off the dialogue betweenthe unconscious internal object world and the world of actual experience with realexternal objects; and (5) the idea that ambivalence in relations between unconsciousinternal objects involves not only the con�ict of love and hate, but also the con�ictbetween the wish to continue to be alive in one’s object relationships and the wish to beat one with one’s dead internal objects.

Keywords: mourning, melancholia, depression, narcissism, identi�cation.

Some authors write what they think; othersthink what they write. The latter seem to dotheir thinking in the very act of writing, as ifthoughts arise from the conjunction of penand paper, the work unfolding by surprise asit goes. Freud in many of his most importantbooks and articles, including ‘Mourning andmelancholia’ (1917a), was a writer of this lat-ter sort. In these writings, Freud made no at-tempt to cover his tracks, for example, hisfalse starts, his uncertainties, his reversals ofthinking (often done mid-sentence), his shel-ving of compelling ideas for the time being

because they seemed to him too speculativeor lacking adequate clinical foundation.

The legacy that Freud left was not simply aset of ideas, but, as important, and insepar-able from those ideas, a new way of thinkingabout human experience that gave rise tonothing less than a new form of humansubjectivity. Each of his psychoanalytic writ-ings, from this point of view, is simulta-neously an explication of a set of conceptsand a demonstration of a newly created wayof thinking about and experiencing ourselves.

I have chosen to look closely at Freud’s

Int. J. Psychoanal. (2002) 83, 767

Copyright # Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 2002

‘Mourning and melancholia’ for two reasons.First, I consider this paper to be one ofFreud’s most important contributions in that itdevelops for the �rst time, in a systematicway, a line of thought which later would betermed ‘object-relations theory’1 (Fairbairn,1952). This line of thought has played a majorrole in shaping psychoanalysis from 1917onwards. Second, I have found that attendingclosely to Freud’s writing as writing in‘Mourning and melancholia’ provides anextraordinary opportunity not only to listen toFreud think, but also, through the writing, toenter into that thinking process with him. Inthis way, the reader may learn a good dealabout what is distinctive to the new form ofthinking (and its attendant subjectivity) thatFreud was in the process of creating in thisarticle.2

Freud wrote ‘Mourning and melancholia’in less than three months in early 1915 duringa period that was, for him, �lled with greatintellectual and emotional upheaval. Europewas in the throes of World War I. Despite hisprotestations, two of Freud’s sons volunteeredfor military service and fought at the frontlines. Freud was at the same time in the gripsof intense intellectual foment. In the years1914 and 1915, Freud wrote a series of twelveessays, which represented his �rst majorrevision of psychoanalytic theory since thepublication of The Interpretation of Dreams(1900). Freud’s intent was to publish thesepapers as a book to be titled Preliminaries toa Metapsychology. He hoped that this collec-

tion would ‘provide a stable theoretical foun-dation for psycho-analysis’ (Freud, quoted byStrachey, 1957, p. 105).

In the summer of 1915, Freud wrote toFerenczi, ‘The twelve articles are, as it were,ready’ (Gay, 1988, p. 367). As the phrase ‘asit were’ suggests, Freud had misgivings aboutwhat he had written. Only �ve of theessays—all of which are ground-breakingpapers—were ever published: ‘Instincts andtheir vicissitudes’, ‘Repression’ and ‘Theunconscious’ were published as journal arti-cles in 1915. ‘A metapsychological supple-ment to the theory of dreams’ and ‘Mourningand melancholia’, although completed in1915, were not published until 1917. Freuddestroyed the other seven articles, whichpapers, he told Ferenczi, ‘deserved suppres-sion and silence’ (Gay, 1988, p. 373). None ofthese articles was shown to even his inner-most circle of friends. Freud’s reasons for‘silencing’ these essays remain a mystery inthe history of psychoanalysis.

In the discussion that follows, I take up �veportions of the text of ‘Mourning and mel-ancholia’, each of which contains a pivotalcontribution to the analytic understanding ofthe unconscious work of mourning and ofmelancholia; at the same time, I look at theway Freud made use of this seemingly focalexploration of these two psychological statesas a vehicle for introducing—as much im-plicitly as explicitly—the foundations ofhis theory of unconscious internal objectrelations.3

1I use the term object-relations theory to refer to a group of psychoanalytic theories holding in common aloosely knit set of metaphors that address the intrapsychic and interpersonal effects of relationships amongunconscious ‘internal’ objects (i.e. among unconscious split-off parts of the personality). This group oftheories coexists in Freudian psychoanalytic theory as a whole with many other overlapping, complementary,often contradictorylines of thought (each utilising somewhat different sets of metaphors).2I have previously discussed (Ogden, 2001a) the interdependenceof the vitality of the ideas and the life of thewriting in a very different, but no less signi�cant, psychoanalytic contribution: Winnicott’s ‘Primitiveemotional development’ (1945).3I am using Strachey’s 1957 translation of ‘Mourning and melancholia’ in the Standard Edition as the text formy discussion. It is beyond the scope of this paper to address questions relating to the quality of thattranslation.

768 THOMAS H. OGDEN

I

Freud’s unique voice resounds in the open-ing sentence of ‘Mourning and melancholia’:‘Dreams having served us as the prototype innormal life of narcissistic mental disorders,we will now try to throw some light on thenature of melancholia by comparing it withthe normal affect of mourning’ (p. 243).

The voice we hear in Freud’s writing isremarkably constant through the twenty-threevolumes of the Standard Edition. It is a voicewith which no other psychoanalyst has writ-ten because no other analyst has had the rightto do so. The voice Freud creates is that of thefounding father of a new discipline.4 Alreadyin this opening sentence, something quiteremarkable can be heard which we regularlytake for granted in reading Freud: in thecourse of the twenty years preceding thewriting of this sentence, Freud had not onlycreated a revolutionary conceptual system, hehad altered language itself. It is, for me,astounding to observe that virtually everyword in the opening sentence has acquired, inFreud’s hands, new meanings and a new setof relationships, not only to practically everyother word in the sentence, but also toinnumerable words in language as a whole.For example, the word ‘dreams’ that beginsthe sentence is a word that conveys rich layersof meaning and mystery that did not existprior to the publication of The Interpretationof Dreams (1900). Concentrated in this wordnewly created by Freud are allusions to (1) aconception of a repressed unconscious innerworld that powerfully, but obliquely, exertsforce on conscious experience, and vice

versa; (2) a view that sexual desire is presentfrom birth onwards and is rooted in bodilyinstincts which manifest themselves in uni-versal unconscious incestuous wishes, parri-cidal fantasies and fears of retaliation in theform of genital mutilation; (3) a recognitionof the role of dreaming as an essentialconversation between unconscious and pre-conscious aspects of ourselves; and (4) aradical reconceptualisation of human symbol-ogy—at once universal and exquisitely idio-syncratic to the life history of eachindividual. Of course, this list is only asampling of the meanings the word‘dream’—newly made by Freud—invokes.

Similarly, the words ‘normal life’, ‘mentaldisorders’ and ‘narcissistic’ speak to oneanother and to the word ‘dream’ in ways thatsimply could not have occurred twenty yearsearlier. The second half of the sentencesuggests that two other words denotingaspects of human experience will be madeanew in this paper: ‘mourning’ and‘melancholia’.5

The logic of the central argument of‘Mourning and melancholia’ begins to unfoldas Freud compares the psychological featuresof mourning to those of melancholia: bothare responses to loss and involve ‘grave de-partures from the normal attitude to life’(p. 243).6 In melancholia, one �nds

a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interestin the outside world, loss of the capacity to love,inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that �nds utterancein self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culmi-nates in a delusional expectation of punishment(p. 244).

4Less than a year before writing ‘Mourning and melancholia’, Freud remarked that no one need wonder abouthis role in the history of psychoanalysis: ‘Psycho-analysis is my creation; for ten years I was the only personwho concernedhimself with it’ (1914a, p. 7).5Freud’s term melancholia is roughly synonymouswith depressionas the latter term is currently used.6Freud comments that ‘it never occurs to us to regard . . . [mourning] as a pathological condition and to refer itto medical treatment . . . We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon anyinterferencewith it as useless or even harmful’ (pp. 243–244). This observation is offered as a statement of theself-evident and may have been so in Vienna in 1915. But, to my mind, that understanding today is paid lipservice far more often than it is genuinely honoured.

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Freud points out that the same traitscharacterise mourning—with one exception:‘the disturbance of self-regard’. Only in retro-spect will the reader realise that the fullweight of the thesis that Freud develops inthis paper rests on this simple observationmade almost in passing: ‘The disturbance inself-regard is absent in mourning; but other-wise the features are the same’ (p. 243). As inevery good detective novel, all clues neces-sary for solving the crime are laid out in plainview practically from the outset.

With the background of the discussion ofthe similarities and differences—there is onlyone symptomatic difference—betweenmourning and melancholia, the paper seemsabruptly to plunge into the exploration of theunconscious. In melancholia, the patient andthe analyst may not even know what thepatient has lost—a remarkable idea from thepoint of view of common sense in 1915. Evenwhen the melancholic is aware that he hassuffered the loss of a person, ‘he knows whomhe has lost but not what he has lost in him’(p. 245). There is ambiguity in Freud’slanguage here: is the melancholic unaware ofthe sort of importance the tie to the objectheld for him: ‘what [it is that the melan-cholic] has lost in [losing] him’. Or is themelancholic unaware of what he has lost inhimself as a consequence of losing the object?The ambiguity—whether or not Freud in-tended it—subtly introduces the importantnotion of the simultaneity and interdepen-dence of two unconscious aspects of objectloss in melancholia. One involves the natureof the melancholic’s tie to the object and theother involves an alteration of the self inresponse to the loss of the object.

This [lack of awareness on the part of the melan-cholic of what he has lost] would suggest thatmelancholia is in some way related to an object-losswhich is withdrawn from consciousness, in contra-distinction to mourning, in which there is nothingabout the loss that is unconscious(p. 245).

In his effort to understand the nature of theunconscious object loss in melancholia,

Freud returns to the sole observable sympto-matic difference between mourning andmelancholia: the melancholic’s diminishedself-esteem.

In mourning it is the world which has become poorand empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. Thepatient represents his ego to us as worthless, incap-able of any achievement and morally despicable; hereproaches himself, vili�es himself and expects to becast out and punished. He abases himself beforeeveryone and commiserates with his own relativesfor being connected with anyone so unworthy. He isnot of the opinion that a change has taken place inhim, but extends his self-criticism back over the past;he declares that he was never any better (p. 246).

More in his use of language than in explicittheoretical statements, Freud’s model of themind is being reworked here. There is asteady �ow of subject–object, I–me pairingsin this passage: the patient as object re-proaches, abases, vili�es himself as object(and extends the reproaches backwards andforwards in time). What is being suggested—and only suggested—is that these subject–object pairings extend beyond consciousnessinto the timeless unconscious and constitutewhat is going on unconsciously in melancho-lia that is not occurring in mourning. Theunconscious is in this sense a metaphoricalplace in which the ‘I–me’ pairings areunconscious psychological contents that ac-tively engage in a continuous timeless attackof the subject (I) upon the object (me) whichdepletes the ego (a concept in transition here)to the point that it becomes ‘poor and empty’in the process.

The melancholic is ill in that he stands in adifferent relationship to his failings than doesthe mourner. The melancholic does not evi-dence the shame one would expect of aperson who experiences himself as ‘petty,egoistic, [and] dishonest’ (p. 246), andinstead demonstrates an ‘insistent communi-cativeness which �nds satisfaction in self-exposure’ (p. 247). Each time Freud returnsto the observation of the melancholic’s dimin-ished self-regard, he makes use of it to

770 THOMAS H. OGDEN

illuminate a different aspect of the uncon-scious ‘internal work’ (p. 245) of melancho-lia. This time the observation, with itsaccrued set of meanings, becomes an impor-tant underpinning for a new conception of theego, which to this point has only been hintedat:

. . . the melancholic’s disorder affords [a view] of theconstitution of the human ego. We see how in [themelancholic] one part of the ego sets itself overagainst the other, judges it critically, and, as it were,takes it as its object . . . What we are here becomingacquainted with is the agency commonly called‘conscience’ . . . and we shall come upon evidence toshow that it can become diseased on its own account(p. 247).

Here, Freud is reconceiving the ego inseveral important ways. These revisions takentogether constitute the �rst of a set of tenetsunderlying Freud’s emerging psychoanalytictheory of unconscious internal object rela-tions: �rst, the ego, now a psychic structurewith conscious and unconscious components(‘parts’), can be split; second, an unconscioussplit-off aspect of the ego has the capacity togenerate thoughts and feelings indepen-dently—in the case of the critical agencythese thoughts and feelings are of a self-observing moralistic, judgemental sort; third,a split-off part of the ego may enter into anunconscious relationship to another part ofthe ego; and, fourth, a split-off aspect of theego may be either healthy or pathological.

II

The paper becomes positively fugue-like inits structure as Freud takes up again—yet in anew way—the sole symptomatic differencebetween mourning and melancholia:

If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many andvarious self-accusations,one cannot in the end avoidthe impression that often the most violent of them arehardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but thatwith insigni�cant modi�cations they do �t someoneelse, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or

should love . . . So we �nd the key to the clinicalpicture: we perceive that the self-reproaches arereproaches against a loved object which have beenshifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego(p. 248).

Thus, Freud, as if developing enhancedobservational acuity as he writes, sees some-thing he previously had not noticed—that theaccusations the melancholic heaps upon him-self represent unconsciously displaced attackson the loved object. This observation servesas a starting point from which Freud goes onto posit a second set of elements of hisobject-relations theory.

In considering the melancholic’s uncon-scious reproaches of the loved object, Freudpicks up a thread that he had introducedearlier in the discussion. Melancholia ofteninvolves a psychological struggle involvingambivalent feelings for the loved object as ‘inthe case of a betrothed girl who has beenjilted’ (p. 245). Freud elaborates on the roleof ambivalence in melancholia by observingthat melancholics show not the slightesthumility despite their insistence on their ownworthlessness ‘and always seem as thoughthey felt slighted and had been treated withgreat injustice’ (p. 248). Their intense senseof entitlement and injustice ‘is possible onlybecause the reactions expressed in their be-haviour still proceed from a mental constella-tion of revolt, which has then, by a certainprocess, passed over into the crushed state ofmelancholia’ (p. 248).

It seems to me that Freud is suggesting thatthe melancholic experiences outrage (as op-posed to anger of other sorts) at the object fordisappointing him and doing him a ‘greatinjustice’. This emotional protest/revolt iscrushed in melancholia as a consequence of‘a certain process’. It is the delineation of that‘certain process’ in theoretical terms that willoccupy much of the remainder of ‘Mourningand melancholia’.

The reader can hear unmistakable excite-ment in Freud’s voice in the sentencethat follows: ‘There is no dif�culty in

A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY 771

reconstructing this [transformative] process’(p. 248). Ideas are falling into place. A certainclarity is emerging from the tangle ofseemingly contradictory observations, forexample, the melancholic’s combination ofsevere self-condemnation and vociferousself-righteous outrage. In spelling out thepsychological process mediating the mel-ancholic’s movement from revolt (againstinjustices he has suffered) to a crushed state,Freud, with extraordinary dexterity, presentsa radically new conception of the structure ofthe unconscious:

An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to aparticular person, had at one time existed [for themelancholic]; then, owing to a real slight or disap-pointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not thenormal one of a withdrawal of the libido [lovingemotional energy] from this object and a displace-ment of it on to a new one . . . [Instead,] the object-cathexis [the emotional investment in the object]proved to have little power of resistance [littlecapacity to maintain the tie to the object], and wasbrought to an end. But the free libido was notdisplaced on to another object; it was withdrawn intothe ego. There . . . it [the loving emotional investmentwhich has been withdrawn from the object] served toestablish an identi�cation of [a part of] the ego withthe abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the objectfell upon [a part of] the ego, and the latter couldhenceforth be judged by a special agency [anotherpart of the ego], as though it were an object, theforsaken object. In this way an object-loss wastransformed into an ego-loss and the con�ict betweenthe ego and the loved person [was transformed] into acleavage between the critical activity of [a part of]the ego [later to be called the superego] and [another

part of] the ego as altered by identi�cation (pp. 248–249).

These sentences represent a powerfullysuccinct demonstration of the way Freud inthis paper was beginning to write/think theo-retically and clinically in terms of relation-ships between unconscious, paired, split-offaspects of the ego (i.e. about unconsciousinternal object relations).7 Freud, for the �rsttime, is gathering together into a coherentnarrative expressed in higher order theor-etical terms his newly conceived revisedmodel of the mind.

There is so much going on in this passagethat it is dif�cult to know where to start indiscussing it. Freud’s use of language seemsto me to afford a port of entry into this criticalmoment in the development of psychoanaly-tic thought. There is an important shift in thelanguage Freud is using that serves to con-vey a rethinking of an important aspect ofhis conception of melancholia. The words‘object-loss’, ‘lost object’ and even ‘lost asan object of love’ are, without comment onFreud’s part, replaced by the words ‘aban-doned object’ and ‘forsaken object’.

The melancholic’s ‘abandonment’ of theobject (as opposed to the mourner’s loss ofthe object) involves a paradoxical psycholo-gical event: the abandoned object, for themelancholic, is preserved in the form of anidenti�cation with it: ‘Thus [in identifyingwith the object] the shadow of the object fellupon the ego . . .’ (p. 249). In melancholia,the ego is altered not by the glow of theobject, but (more darkly) by ‘the shadow of

7While Freud made use of the idea of ‘an internal world’ in ‘Mourning and melancholia’, it was Klein (1935,1940, 1952) who transformed the idea into a systematic theory of the structure of the unconscious and of theinterplay between the internal object world and the world of external objects. In developing her conception ofthe unconscious, Klein richly contributed to a critical alteration of analytic theory. She shifted the dominantmetaphors from those associated with Freud’s topographic and structural models to a set of spatial metaphors(some stated, some only suggested in ‘Mourning and melancholia’). These spatial metaphors depict anunconscious inner world inhabited by ‘internal objects’—split-off aspects of the ego—that are bound togetherin ‘internal object relationships’ by powerful affective ties. (For a discussion of the concepts of ‘internalobjects’ and ‘internal object relations’ as these ideas evolved in the work of Freud, Abraham, Klein, Fairbairnand Winnicott, see Ogden, 1983.)

772 THOMAS H. OGDEN

the object’. The shadow metaphor suggeststhat the melancholic’s experience of identify-ing with the abandoned object has a thin,two-dimensional quality as opposed to alively, robust feeling tone. The painful experi-ence of loss is short-circuited by the melan-cholic’s identi�cation with the object, thusdenying the separateness of the object: theobject is me and I am the object. There is noloss; an external object (the abandonedobject) is omnipotently replaced by an inter-nal one (the ego-identi�ed-with-the-object).

So, in response to the pain of loss, the egois twice split forming an internal objectrelationship in which one split-off part ofthe ego (the critical agency) angrily (withoutrage) turns on another split-off part ofthe ego (the ego-identi�ed-with-the-object).Although Freud does not speak in theseterms, it could be said that the internal objectrelationship is created for purposes of evad-ing the painful feeling of object-loss. Thisavoidance is achieved by means of an uncon-scious ‘deal with the devil’: in exchange forthe evasion of the pain of object loss, themelancholic is doomed to experience thesense of lifelessness that comes as a conse-quence of disconnecting oneself from largeportions of external reality. In this sense, themelancholic forfeits a substantial part of hisown life—the three-dimensional emotionallife lived in the world of real external objects.The internal world of the melancholic ispowerfully shaped by the wish to hold captivethe object in the form of an imaginary sub-stitute for it—the ego-identi�ed-with-the-object. In a sense, the internalisation of theobject renders the object forever captive tothe melancholic and at the same time rendersthe melancholic endlessly captive to it.

A dream of one of my patients comes tomind as a particularly poignant expression ofthe frozen quality of the melancholic’s uncon-scious internal object world.

The patient, Mr K, began analysis a yearafter the death of his wife of twenty-twoyears. In a dream that Mr K reported severalyears into the analysis, he was attending a

gathering in which a tribute was to be paid tosomeone whose identity was unclear to him.Just as the proceedings were getting underway, a man in the audience rose to his feetand spoke glowingly of Mr K’s �ne characterand important accomplishments. When theman �nished, the patient stood and expressedhis gratitude for the high praise, but said thatthe purpose of the meeting was to pay tributeto the guest of honour, so the group’s attentionshould be directed to him. Immediately uponMr K’s sitting down, another person stoodand again praised the patient at great length.Mr K again stood and, after brie�y repeatinghis statement of gratitude for the adulation,he redirected the attention of the gathering tothe honoured guest. This sequence was re-peated again and again until the patient hadthe terrifying realisation that this sequencewould go on forever. Mr K awoke from thedream with his heart racing in a state ofpanic.

The patient had told me in the sessionspreceding the dream that he had becomeincreasingly despairing of ever being able tolove another woman and ‘resume life’. Hesaid he has never ceased expecting his wife toreturn home after work each evening at six-thirty. He added that every family event afterher death has been for him nothing more thananother occasion at which his wife is missing.He apologised for his lugubrious, self-pityingtones.

I told Mr K that I thought that the dreamcaptured a sense of the way he feels impri-soned in his inability genuinely to be inter-ested in, much less honour, new experienceswith people. In the dream, he, in the form ofthe guests paying endless homage to him,directed to himself what might have beeninterest paid to someone outside of himself,someone outside of his internally frozenrelationship with his wife. I went on to saythat it was striking that the honoured guest inthe dream was not given a name, much lessan identity and human qualities which mighthave stirred curiosity, puzzlement, anger,jealousy, envy, compassion, love, admiration

A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY 773

or any other set of feeling responses toanother person. I added that the horror he feltat the end of the dream seemed to re�ect hisawareness that the static state of self-imprisonment in which he lives is potentiallyendless. (A good deal of this interpretationreferred back to many discussions Mr K and Ihad had concerning his state of being ‘stuck’in a world that no longer existed.) Mr Kresponded by telling me that as I was speak-ing he remembered another part of the dreammade up of a single still image of himselfwrapped in heavy chains unable to move evena single muscle of his body. He said he feltrepelled by the extreme passivity of theimage.

The dreams and the discussion that fol-lowed represented something of a turningpoint in the analysis. The patient’s response toseparations from me between sessions andduring weekend and holiday breaks becameless frighteningly bleak for him. In the periodfollowing this session, Mr K found that hesometimes could go for hours without experi-encing the heavy bodily sensation in his chestthat he had lived with unremittingly since hiswife’s death.

While the idea of the melancholic’s uncon-scious identi�cation with the lost/abandonedobject for Freud held ‘the key to the clinicalpicture’ (p. 248) of melancholia, Freud be-lieved that the key to the theoretical problemof melancholia would have to satisfactorilyresolve an important contradiction:

On the one hand, a strong �xation [an intense, yetstatic emotional tie] to the loved object must havebeen present; on the other hand, in contradiction tothis, the object-cathexis must have had little powerof resistance [i.e. little power to maintain that tieto the object in the face of actual or feared deathof the object or object-loss as a consequence ofdisappointment] (p. 249).

The ‘key’ to a psychoanalytic theory ofmelancholia that resolves the contradiction ofthe coexisting strong �xation to the objectand the lack of tenacity of that object-tie lies,for Freud, in the concept of narcissism: ‘thiscontradiction seems to imply that the object-choice has been effected on a narcissisticbasis, so that the object-cathexis, when ob-stacles come in its way, can regress tonarcissism’ (p. 249).

Freud’s theory of narcissism, which he hadintroduced only months earlier in his paper,‘On narcissism: an introduction’ (1914b),provided an important part of the context forthe object-relations theory of melancholiathat Freud was developing in ‘Mourning andmelancholia’. In his narcissism paper, Freudproposed that the normal infant begins in astate of ‘original’ or ‘primary narcissism’(p. 75), a state in which all emotional energyis ego-libido, a form of emotional investmentthat takes the ego (oneself) as its sole object.The infant’s initial step towards the worldoutside of himself is in the form of narcissis-tic identi�cation—a type of object-tie thattreats the external object as an extension ofoneself.

From the psychological position of narcis-sistic identi�cation, the healthy infant, intime, develops suf�cient psychological stabi-lity to engage in a narcissistic form ofrelatedness to objects in which the tie to theobject is largely comprised of a displacementof ego-libido from the ego on to the object(Freud, 1914b). In other words, a narcissisticobject-tie is one in which the object isinvested with emotional energy that originallywas directed at oneself (and, in that sense, theobject is a stand-in for the self). The move-ment from narcissistic identi�cation to narcis-sistic object-tie is a matter of a shift in thedegree of recognition of, and emotionalinvestment in, the otherness of the object.8

8At the same time as the infant is engaged in the movement from narcissistic identi�cation to narcissisticobject-tie, he is simultaneously engaged in the development of a ‘type . . . of object-choice [driven by object-libido], which may be called the ‘‘anaclitic’’or ‘‘attachment type’’’ (Freud, 1914b, p. 87). The latter form ofobject relatedness has its ‘source’ (p. 87) in the infant’s ‘original attachment . . .[to] the persons who are

774 THOMAS H. OGDEN

The healthy infant is able to achieveprogessive differentiation of, and comple-mentarity between, ego-libido and object-libido. In this process of differentiation, heis beginning to engage in a form of object-love that is not simply a displacement oflove of oneself on to the object. Instead, amore mature form of object-love evolves inwhich the infant achieves relatedness toobjects that are experienced as external tohimself—outside the realm of the infant’somnipotence.

Herein lies, for Freud, the key to thetheoretical problem—the ‘contradiction’—posed by melancholia: melancholia is adisease of narcissism. A necessary ‘precondi-tion’ (p. 249) for melancholia is a disturbancein early narcissistic development. The melan-cholic patient in infancy and childhood wasunable to move successfully from narcissisticobject-love to mature object-love involving aperson who is experienced as separate fromhimself. Consequently, in the face of object-loss or disappointment, the melancholic isincapable of mourning, i.e. unable to face thefull impact of the reality of the loss of theobject and, over time, to enter into matureobject-love with another person. The melan-cholic does not have the capacity to disen-gage from the lost object and instead evadesthe pain of loss through regression fromnarcissistic object relatedness to narcissisticidenti�cation: ‘the result of which is that inspite of the con�ict [disappointment leadingto outrage] with the loved person, the loverelation need not be given up’ (p. 249). AsFreud put it in a summary statement near theend of the paper, ‘So by taking �ight into theego [by means of a powerful narcissisticidenti�cation] love escapes extinction’(p. 257).

A misreading of ‘Mourning and melancho-lia’, to my mind, has become entrenched in

what is commonly held to be Freud’s view ofmelancholia (see, for example, Gay, 1988, pp.372–3). What I am referring to is themisconception that melancholia, according toFreud, involves an identi�cation with thehated aspect of an ambivalently loved objectthat has been lost. Such a reading, whileaccurate so far as it goes, misses the centralpoint of Freud’s thesis. What differentiatesthe melancholic from the mourner is the factthat the melancholic all along has been ableto engage only in narcissistic forms of objectrelatedness. The narcissistic nature of themelancholic’s personality renders him incap-able of maintaining a �rm connection withthe painful reality of the irrevocable loss ofthe object that is necessary for mourning.Melancholia involves ready, re�exive re-course to regression to narcissistic identi�ca-tion as a way of not experiencing the hardedge of recognition of one’s inability to undothe fact of the loss of the object. Object-relations theory, as it is taking shape in thecourse of Freud’s writing this paper, nowincludes an early developmental axis. Theworld of unconscious internal object relationsis being viewed by Freud as a defensiveregression to very early forms of objectrelatedness in response to psychologicalpain—in the case of the melancholic, the painis the pain of loss. The individual replaceswhat might have become a three-dimensionalrelatedness to the mortal and at times dis-appointing external object with a two-dimensional (shadow-like) relationship to aninternal object that exists in a psychologicaldomain outside of time (and consequentlysheltered from the reality of death). In sodoing, the melancholic evades the pain of lossand, by extension, other forms of psychologi-cal pain, but does so at an enormous cost—the loss of a good deal of his own (emotional)vitality.

concerned with a child’s feeding, care, and protection . . .’ (p. 87) In health, the two forms of objectrelatedness—narcissistic and attachment-type—develop ‘side by side’ (p. 87). Under less than optimalenvironmental or biological circumstances, the infant may develop psychopathology characterised by analmost exclusive reliance on narcissisticobject relatedness (as opposed to relatednessof an attachment sort).

A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY 775

III

Having hypothesised the melancholic’ssubstitution of an unconscious internal objectrelationship for an external one and havingwed this to a conception of defensive regres-sion to narcissistic identi�cation, Freud turnsto a third de�ning feature of melancholiawhich, as will be seen, provides the basis foranother important feature of his psychoanaly-tic theory of unconscious internal objectrelationships:

In melancholia, the occasions which give rise to theillness extend for the most part beyond the clear caseof a loss by death, and include all those situations ofbeing slighted, neglected or disappointed, which canimport opposed feelings of love and hate into therelationship or reinforce an already existing ambiva-lence . . . The melancholic’s erotic cathexis [eroticemotional investment in the object] . . . has thusundergone a double vicissitude: part of it hasregressed to [narcissistic] identi�cation, but the otherpart, under the in�uence of the con�ict due toambivalence, has been carried back to the stage ofsadism . . . (pp. 251–2).

Sadism is a form of object-tie in whichhate (the melancholic’s outrage at the object)becomes inextricably intertwined with eroticlove, and in this combined state can be aneven more powerful binding force (in asuffocating, subjugating, tyrannising way)than the ties of love alone. The sadism inmelancholia (generated in response to theloss of or disappointment by a loved object)gives rise to a special form of torment forboth the subject and the object—that particu-lar mixture of love and hate encountered instalking. In this sense, the sadistic aspect ofthe relationship of the critical agency to thesplit-off ego-identi�ed-with-the-object mightbe thought of as a relentless, crazed stalkingof one split-off aspect of the ego by an-other—what Fairbairn (1944) would laterview as the love/hate bond between thelibidinal ego and the exciting object.

This conception of the enormous bindingforce of combined love and hate is an integral

part of the psychoanalytic understanding ofthe astounding durability of pathologicalinternal object relations. Such allegiance tothe bad (hated and hating) internal object isoften the source for both the stability of thepathological structure of the patient’s person-ality organisation, and for some of the mostintractable transference–countertransferenceimpasses that we encounter in analytic work.In addition, the bonds of love mixed with hateaccount for such forms of pathological rela-tionships as the ferocious ties of the abusedchild and the battered spouse to their abusers(and the tie of the abusers to the abused). Theabuse is unconsciously experienced by bothabused and abuser as loving hate and hatefullove—both of which are far preferable to noobject relationship at all (Fairbairn, 1944).

IV

Employing one of his favourite extendedmetaphors—the analyst as detective—Freudcreates in his writing a sense of adventure,risk-taking and even suspense as he takes on‘the most remarkable characteristic of mel-ancholia . . . its tendency to change round intomania—a state which is the opposite of it inits symptoms’ (p. 253). Freud’s use of lan-guage in his discussion of mania—which isinseparable from the ideas he presents—creates for the reader a sense of the funda-mental differences between mourning andmelancholia, and between healthy (internaland external) object relationships and patho-logical ones.

I cannot promise that this attempt [to explain mania]will prove entirely satisfactory. It hardly carries usmuch beyond the possibility of taking one’s initialbearings. We have two things to go upon: the �rst is apsycho-analytic impression, and the second what wemay perhaps call a matter of general economicexperience. The [psycho-analytic]impression . . . [is]that . . . both disorders [mania and melancholia] arewrestling with the same [unconscious] ‘complex’,but that probably in melancholia the ego hassuccumbed to the complex [in the form of a painful

776 THOMAS H. OGDEN

feeling of having been crushed] whereas in mania ithas mastered it [the pain of loss] or pushed it aside(pp. 253–4).

The second of the two things ‘we have . . .to go upon’ is ‘general economic experience’.In attempting to account for the feelings ofexuberance and triumph in mania, Freudhypothesised that the economics of mania—the quantitative distribution and play ofpsychological forces—may be similar tothose seen when

some poor wretch, by winning a large sum of money,is suddenly relieved from chronic worry about hisdaily bread, or when a long and arduous struggle is�nally crowned with success, or when a man �ndshimself in a position to throw off at a single blowsome oppressive compulsion, some false positionwhich he has long had to keep up, and so on (p. 254).

Beginning with the pun on ‘economicconditions’ in the description of the poorwretch who wins a great deal of money, thesentence goes on to capture something of thefeel of mania in its succession of imageswhich are unlike any other set of images inthe article. These dramatic cameos suggest tome Freud’s own understandable magicalwishes to have his own ‘arduous struggle . . .�nally crowned with success’ or to be able ‘tothrow off at a single blow [his own] . . .oppressive compulsion’ to write prodigiousnumbers of books and articles in his efforts toattain for himself and psychoanalysis thestature they deserve. And like the inevitableend of the expanding bubble of mania, thedriving force of the succession of imagesseems to collapse into the sentences thatimmediately follow:

This explanation [of mania by analogy to other formsof sudden release from pain] certainly soundsplausible, but in the �rst place it is too inde�nite, and,secondly, it gives rise to more new problems anddoubts than we can answer. We will not evade adiscussion of them, even though we cannot expect itto lead us to a clear understanding(p. 255).

Freud—whether or not he was aware of

it—is doing more than alerting the reader tohis uncertainties regarding how to understandmania and its relation to melancholia; he isshowing the reader, in his use of language, inthe structure of his thinking and writing, whatit sounds like and feels like to think and writein a way that does not attempt to confuse whatis omnipotently, self-deceptively wished forwith what is real; words are used in an effortto simply, accurately, clearly give ideas andsituations their proper names.

Bion’s work provides a useful context forunderstanding more fully the signi�cance ofFreud’s comment that he will not ‘evade’ thenew problems and doubts to which hishypothesis gives rise. Bion (1962) uses theidea of evasion to refer to what he believes tobe a hallmark of psychosis: eluding painrather than attempting to symbolise it foroneself (for example, in dreaming), live withit and do genuine psychological work with itover time. The latter response to pain—livingwith it, symbolising it for oneself and doingpsychological work with it—lies at the heartof the experience of mourning. In contrast,the manic patient who ‘master[s] the [pain ofloss] . . . or push[es] it aside’ (Freud, 1917a,p. 254) transforms what might become afeeling of a terrible disappointment, alone-ness and impotent rage into a state resem-bling ‘joy, exultation or triumph’ (p. 254).

I believe that Freud here, without explicitacknowledgement—and perhaps withoutconscious awareness—begins to address thepsychotic edge of mania and melancholia.The psychotic aspect of both mania andmelancholia involve the evasion of grief aswell as a good deal of external reality. This iseffected by means of multiple splittings of theego in conjunction with the creation of atimeless imaginary internal object relation-ship which omnipotently substitutes for theloss of a real external object relationship.More broadly speaking, a fantasied uncon-scious internal object world replaces anactual external one; omnipotence replaceshelplessness; immortality substitutes for theuncompromising realities of the passage of

A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY 777

time and of death; triumph replaces despair;contempt substitutes for love.

Thus Freud (in part explicitly, in partimplicitly, and perhaps in part unknowingly)through his discussion of mania adds anotherimportant element to his evolving object-relations theory. The reader can hear inFreud’s use of language (for example, in hiscomments on the manic patient’s trium-phantly pushing aside the pain of loss andexulting in his imaginary victory over the lostobject) the idea that the unconscious internalobject world of the manic patient is con-structed for the purpose of evading, ‘taking�ight’ (p. 257) from, the external reality ofloss and death. This act of taking �ight fromexternal reality has the effect of plunging thepatient into a sphere of omnipotent thinkingcut off from life lived in relation to ac-tual external objects. The world of externalobject relations becomes depleted as a con-sequence of its having been disconnectedfrom the individual’s unconscious internalobject world. The patient’s experience in theworld of external objects is disconnectedfrom the enlivening ‘�re’ (Loewald, 1978, p.189) of the unconscious internal object world.Conversely, the unconscious internal objectworld, having been cut off from the world ofexternal objects, cannot grow, cannot ‘learnfrom experience’ (Bion, 1962) and cannotenter (in more than a very limited way) intogenerative ‘conversations’ between uncon-scious and preconscious aspects of oneself ‘atthe frontier of dreaming’ (Ogden, 2001b).

V

Freud concludes the paper with a series ofthoughts on a wide range of topics related tomourning and melancholia. Of these, Freud’sexpansion of the concept of ambivalence is, Ibelieve, the one that represents the mostimportant contribution both to the under-standing of melancholia and to the develop-ment of his object-relations theory. Freud haddiscussed on many previous occasions, begin-

ning as early as 1900, a view of ambivalenceas an unconscious con�ict of love and hate inwhich the individual unconsciously loves thesame person he hates, for example, in thedistressing ambivalence of healthy oedipalexperience or in the paralysing torments ofthe ambivalence of the obsessional neurotic.In ‘Mourning and melancholia’ Freud usesthe term ambivalence in a strikingly differentway; he uses it to refer to a struggle betweenthe wish to live with the living and the wish tobe at one with the dead:

. . . hate and love contend with each other [inmelancholia]; the one seeks to detach the libido fromthe object [thus allowing the subject to live and theobject to die], the other to maintain this position ofthe libido [which is bonded to the immortal internalversion of the object] (p. 256).

Thus, the melancholic experiences a con-�ict between, on the one hand, the wish to bealive with the pain of irreversible loss and thereality of death and, on the other hand, thewish to deaden himself to the pain of loss andthe knowledge of death. The individual cap-able of mourning succeeds in freeing himselffrom the struggle between life and death thatfreezes the melancholic: ‘mourning impelsthe ego to give up the object by declaring theobject to be dead and offering the ego theinducement of continuing to live . . .’ (p.257). So the mourner’s painful acceptance ofthe reality of the death of the object isachieved in part because the mourner knows(unconsciously and at times consciously) thathis own life, his own capacity for ‘continuingto live’, is at stake.

I am reminded of a patient who begananalysis with me almost twenty years afterthe death of her husband. Ms G told me that,not long after her husband’s death, she hadspent a weekend alone at a lake where, foreach of the �fteen years before his death, sheand her husband had rented a cabin. She toldme that during a trip to the lake soon after hisdeath, she had set out alone in a motorboatand headed towards a labyrinth of small

778 THOMAS H. OGDEN

islands and tortuous waterways that she andher husband had explored many times. Ms Gsaid that the idea had come to her with asense of absolute certainty that her husbandwas in that set of waterways and that, if shewere to have entered that part of the lake, shenever would have come out because shewould not have been able to ‘tear’ herselfaway from him. She told me that she had hadto �ght with all her might not to go to be withher husband.

That decision not to follow her husbandinto death became an important symbol in theanalysis of the patient’s choosing to live herlife in a world �lled with the pain of grief andher living memories of her husband. As theanalysis proceeded, that same event at thelake came to symbolise something quitedifferent: the incompleteness of her act of‘tearing’ herself away from her husband afterhis death. It became increasingly clear in thetransference–countertransference that, in animportant sense, a part of herself had gonewith her husband into death, that is, an aspectof herself had been deadened and that thathad been ‘all right’ with her until thatjuncture in the analysis.

In the course of the subsequent year ofanalysis, Ms G experienced a sense ofenormous loss—not only the loss of herhusband, but also the loss of her own life. Sheconfronted for the �rst time the pain andsadness of the recognition of the ways shehad for decades unconsciously limited herselfwith regard to utilising her intelligence andartistic talents as well as her capacities to befully alive in her everyday experience (in-cluding her analysis). (I do not view Ms G asmanic, or even as relying heavily on manic

defences, but I believe that she holds incommon with the manic patient a form ofambivalence that involves a tension between,on the one hand, the wish to live life amongthe living—internally and externally—and,on the other hand, the wish to exist with thedead in a timeless dead and deadening inter-nal object world.)

Returning to Freud’s discussion of mania,the manic patient is engaged in a ‘struggle ofambivalence [in a desperate unconsciouseffort to come to life through] loosen[ing]the �xation of the libido to the [internal]object by disparaging it, denigrating it andeven as it were killing it’ (p. 257).9 Thissentence is surprising: mania represents notonly the patient’s effort to evade the pain ofgrief by disparaging and denigrating theobject. Mania also represents the patient’s(often unsuccessful) attempts to achieve griefby freeing himself from the mutual captivityinvolved in the unconscious internal relation-ship with the lost object. In order to grievethe loss of the object, one must �rst kill it,that is, one must do the psychological workof allowing the object to be irrevocably dead,both in one’s own mind and in the externalworld.

By introducing the notion of a form ofambivalence involving the struggle betweenthe wish to go on living and the wish todeaden oneself in an effort to be with thedead, Freud added a critical dimension to hisobject-relations theory: the notion that uncon-scious internal object relations may haveeither a living and enlivening quality or adead and deadening quality (and, by exten-sion, every possible combination of the two).Such a way of conceiving the internal object

9The reader can hear the voice of Melanie Klein (1935, 1940) in this part of Freud’s comments on mania. Allthree elements of Klein’s (1935) well-known clinical triad characterising mania and the manic defence—control, contempt and triumph—can be found in nascent form in Freud’s conception of mania. The objectnever will be lost or missed because it is, in unconsciousfantasy, under one’s omnipotent control, so there is nodanger of losing it; even if the object were to be lost, it would not matter because the contemptible object is‘valueless’ (p. 257) and one is better off without it; moreover, being without the object is a ‘triumph’ (p. 254),an occasion for ‘enjoy[ing]’ (p. 257) one’s emancipation from the burdensome albatross that has been hangingfrom one’s neck.

A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY 779

world has been central to recent develop-ments in psychoanalytic theory pioneered byWinnicott (1971) and Green (1983). Theseauthors have placed emphasis on the impor-tance of the analyst’s and the patient’s experi-ences of the aliveness and deadness of thepatient’s internal object world. The sense ofaliveness and deadness of the transference–countertransference is, to my mind, perhapsthe single most important measure of thestatus of the analytic process on a moment-to-moment basis (Ogden, 1995, 1997). Thesound of much of current analytic thinking—and I suspect the sound of psychoanalyticthinking yet to come—can be heard inFreud’s ‘Mourning and melancholia’, if weknow how to listen.

Freud closes the paper with a voice ofgenuine humility, breaking off his enquirymid-thought:

—But here once again, it will be well to call a haltand to postpone any further explanation of mania . . .As we already know, the interdependence of thecomplicated problems of the mind forces us to breakoff every enquiry before it is completed—till theoutcome of some other enquiry can come to itsassistance (p. 259).

How better to end a paper on the pain offacing reality and the consequences of at-tempts to evade it? The solipsistic world of apsychoanalytic theorist who is not �rmlygrounded in the reality of his lived experiencewith patients is very similar to the self-imprisoned melancholic who survives in atimeless, deathless (and yet deadened anddeadening) internal object world.

Translations of summary

Der Autor prasentiert ein neuerliches Lesen vonFreuds ‘‘Trauer und Melancholie’’, in dem er nichtnur die Ideen, die Freud einfuhrte, pruft, sondernauch, was gleich wichtig ist, die Art und Weise, wieer in dieser entscheidenenden Arbeit denkt undschreibt. Der Autor zeigt, wie Freud seine Er-forschungder unbewusstenArbeit der Trauer und derMelancholie benutzt, um einige der Hauptlehrsatze

eines revidierten Modells der Psyche vorzustellenund zu erforschen (was spater ‘Objektbeziehungsthe-orie’ genannt wird). Die prinzipiellen Lehren seinesrevidierten Modells, das er in dieser Arbeit 1917vorstellt, beinhalten: erstens, die Idee, dass dasUnbewusste in signi�kantem Ausmass um stabileinnere Objektbeziehungen zwischen abgespaltenenTeilen des Ichs in Paaren organisiert ist; zweitens,der Begriff, dass mithilfe des Ersetzens einer ausse-ren Objektbeziehung durch eine unbewusste phanta-sierte innere Objektbeziehung psychischer Schmerzabgewehrt werden kann; drittens, die Idee, dasspathologische Liebesbeziehungen vermischt mitHass die starksten Bindungen sind, die innere Objektein einem Zustand von gegenseitigemGefangenhaltenaneinander binden; viertens, der Begriff, dass diePsychopathologie innerer Objektbeziehungenoft denGebrauch omnipotenten Denkens in solch einemAusmass benutzt, dass es den Dialog zwischen derunbewussten inneren Objektwelt und der Welt derwirklichen Erlebnisse mit wirklichen ausseren Ob-jekten abschneidet; funftens, die Idee, dass Ambiv-alenz in Beziehungen zwischen unbewussten innerenObjekten nicht nur den Kon�ict zwischen Liebe undHass einbezieht, sondern auch den Kon�ikt zwischendem Wunsch, lebendig in seinen Objektbeziehungenbleiben zu wollen und dem Wunsch eins mit seinentoten inneren Objekten zu sein.

El autor presenta una lectura de Duelo y Melanco-lía de Freud, en la que examina no solo las ideas queeste introdujo ahí, sino, cuestion de igual importan-cia, la manera en la que penso/escribio esa obra, queel tiempo convertiría en hito. El autor demuestracomo Freud uso su exploracion del trabajo incon-sciente del duelo y la melancolía para proponer yexplorar algunos de los principales preceptos de unmodelo revisado de la mente (que luego se llamaría‘‘la teoria de relaciones objetales’’). Los principalespreceptos del modelo revisado presentado en esteescrito de 1917 incluyen: (1) la idea de que elinconsciente se organiza, en signi�cante grado,alrededor de relaciones de objeto estables entrepartes emparejadas clivadas del ego; (2) la nocion deque es posible defenderse del dolor psíquico pormedio del reemplazo de una relacion objetal externapor una relacion objetal interna, inconsciente yfantaseada; (3) la idea de que los lazos patologicos deamor mezclado con odio �guran entre los vínculosmas fuertes, y que dejan liados en mutuo cautiverio alos objetos internos; (4) la nocion de que lasicopatología de las relaciones objetales internas confrecuencia involucra la utilizacion del pensamientoomnipotente, a tal grado que cercena el dialogo entreel mundo objetal inconsciente interno y el mundo dela experiencia actual con objetos reales, y (5) la ideade que la ambivalencia en las relaciones entre objetosinconscientes internos involvora no solo el con�ictode amor y odio, sino tambien el con�icto entre el

780 THOMAS H. OGDEN

deseo de seguir estando vivo en las relacionesobjetales que uno tiene, y el deseo de estar unido conlos propios objetos internos muertos.

Par une lecture de ‘Deuil et melancolie’, l’auteurexamine non seulement les idees que Freud aintroduites mais egalement la direction de sa penseeet son ecriture dans cet article decisif. L’auteurdemontre comment Freud utilise l’exploration dutravail inconscient du deuil et de la melancolie pourproposer et explorer quelques principes majeurs d’unmodele de l’esprit revise (qui, plus tard, sera appele‘theorie de la relation d’objet’). Les elements princi-paux du modele revise presentes dans cet article de1917 comprennent : premierement, l’idee que l’in-conscient est organise, a un degre signi�catif, autourde relations d’objet interne stables entre des partiesdu moi couplees clivees; deuxiemement, l’idee quele remplacement d’une relation d’objet externe parune relation d’objet interne inconsciente fantasmeepuisse etre un moyen de lutter contre la douleurpsychique; troisiemement, l’idee que les liensd’amour meles de haine pathologiques comptentparmi les liens les plus puissants qui lient les objetsinternes les uns aux autres dans une captivitemutuelle; quatriemement, la notion que la psycho-pathologie des relations d’objet interne impliquesouvent l’utilisation d’une pensee omnipotente aupoint que le dialogue entre le monde de l’objetinterne inconscient et le monde de l’experienceconcrete avec les objets externes reels est coupe;cinquiemement, l’idee que l’ambivalence dans lesrelations entre les objets internes inconscients im-plique non seulement le con�it entre l’amour et lahaine, mais aussi le con�it entre le desir de continuera etre vivant dans les relations d’objet de quelqu’un

et le desir d’etre aux prises avec les objets internesmorts de quelqu’un.

L’autore presenta una lettura di Lutto e melanconiadi Freud nella quale egli esamina non solo le ideeintrodotte da Freud ma anche, attribuendovi grandeimportanza, il modo in cui questi pensa e scrive inquesto saggio, che ebbe una vera e propria funzionedi spartiacque. L’autore dimostra come Freud utiliz-zasse la propria esplorazionedel lavoro inconscio dellutto e della malinconia per proporre ed esplorarealcuni dei piu importanti principi di un modellorivisto della mente (che in seguito sarebbe statode�nito ‘‘teoria delle relazioni oggettuali’’). I piuimportanti principi del modello rivisto presentato nelsaggio del 1917 comprendono: (1) l’idea che l’incon-scio si organizzi, in misura signi�cativa, intorno arelazioni d’oggetto interno stabili tra parti scissedell’Io accoppiate; (2) l’idea che ci si possa difenderedal dolore psichico mediante la sostituzione di unarelazione d’oggetto esterno con una relazione d’og-getto interno inconscia e di fantasia; (3) l’idea che ilegami patologici d’amore e odio siano tra i legamipiu forti che tengono uniti gli oggetti interni in unostato di schiavitu reciproca; (4) l’idea che la psicopa-tologia delle relazioni d’oggetto interno spessoimplichi l’uso del pensiero onnipotente a un livellotale da interrompere il dialogo tra il mondo deglioggetti interni inconsci e il mondo dell’esperienzareale con oggetti reali esterni e (5) l’idea chel’ambiguita nei rapporti tra gli oggetti interni incon-sci implichi non soltanto il con�itto di amore e odio,ma anche il con�itto tra il desiderio di continuare aessere vivi nelle proprie relazioni d’oggetto e ildesiderio di essere uniti ai propri oggetti internimorti.

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