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Dear Editors,
I am grateful to Dr. Clarke and Dr. Finnegan for drawing attention to the very telling exchange between Fairbairn and Isaacs during the Controversial Discussions. I find the quotation from Fairbairn to be so concise and pithy a statement of the differences between his ‘object relations theory’ and Klein's that I would like to take a moment to flesh it out in my own words.
Fairbairn begins by saying that: “The concept of ‘phantasy’ has now been rendered obsolete by the concepts of ‘psychical reality’ and ‘internal objects’” (King and Steiner, 1991, p. 359). I understand Fairbairn's statement to reflect his conception that what the infant meets in the ‘unsatisfactory’ mother is a real experience of emotional deprivation and not a phantasy of emotional deprivation. Even the best of mothers will sometimes misread her infant, at other times withdraw emotionally, and at still other times exhaust her capacity to give her infant all that he or she needs. And, of course, there are mother-infant relationships that are pathological to varying degrees. The experience of emotional deprivation leaves the infant feeling that he is not loved and that his love is not valued (Fairbairn, 1944). For Fairbairn, the infant's response to the unsatisfactory experience with the mother is not to engage in the phantasy of splitting off the good mother from the bad one, as Isaacs would have it. Rather, the infant responds by, in fact, splitting off suborganizations of the ego from the main body of the ego. In this way, the infant moves the experience of the unsatisfactory relationship with the mother from the world of external object relationships to the world of internal object relationships. By contrast with the phantasied ‘internal objects’ of Isaacs and Klein, Fairbairn's ‘internal objects’ have an “organized structure, an identity of their own, an endopsychic existence and an activity as real within the inner world as those of any objects in the external world …” (King and Ste