Fictions of the internal object

This paper examines internal objects in their role as theoretical constructs which analysts use to make sense of human experience. Object relations theory is based upon a vision that the personality is divided or split into parts. Clinical experience reveals that such splits are commonly expressed in the language of our analysands. However, a lexical reality is not a thing-in-itself, but a way of organizing and understanding experience. Jung's vision of the dynamics of the split self encompass a unique ‘object relations theory’ that is both similar and yet quite different from the object relations theories of Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Thomas Ogden. A clinical example is used to examine the way in which these different theoretical views explain the same clinical phenomenon. The last section of the paper is devoted to a narrational analysis of the place of internal objects in analytic theory. The split self dynamic is seen as a narrative device—one that makes sense and provides coherence, but is neither the only view of psychic reality nor necessarily an accurate reflection of the nature of the internal world.