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If we believe that children's development and sexual identification depends on the object relations they have achieved, then we must consider what happens where this achievement has not truly taken place. We are aware that in some cases a child turns away from relying or is unable to rely on an internal object, and sets up an internal structure of its own from which it hopes to gain protection and security.
This “turning away” has been seen in a variety of ways by different psycho-analysts. For instance: Mrs Klein described vividly the role played by envy, and this has been developed by Kleinians into a theory of narcissistic organisation. Guntrip talked more in terms of fear and intolerable vulnerability. More recently Meltzer has developed the Kleinian picture and talked about the aesthetic conflict - the overpowering aesthetic impact of the mother on the baby, and his conflicts around the inaccessibility of her internal world, that is, around her essential mysteriousness. To this list we certainly have to add the failure of the external object to give the child a basis for object relatedness - so that the turning away would be reactive.
Whichever view of the causation one takes, and I do not intend to explore this in depth here, there is a turning away from the object to an internal narcissistic structure - that is, to a manufactured object - an object of one's own making. Of course, the character of the turning away will affect the nature of the narcissistic structure, and the content of the work needing to be done in therapy. But I consider that there are some characteristics which are common to narcissistic states:
The suppression of vulnerable infantile needs - this involves a cruel attitude to the infantile part of the personality;
The manufacture of an invulnerable, supposedly protective, big-brother part of the personality, which is frequently clever at propagandising against vulnerability and object relatedness;
Suspicion of an object that tries to