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Our interest in self/selfobject fixations stems from an abiding concern with the difficulties we experience with patients who suffer throughout their life within the prison of their fixated selves. They petition for help, they wish to be free from the strictures of their self-distortions and they struggle mightily in their analyses to obtain relief; but the limited capacities of some of these patients to enter into a potentially curative bond—a self/selfobject merger—will not permit this bonding. In others, the resistance to development may become manifest only in the working-through phase of analysis, and in still others the difficulties may be seen in the termination phase of their analysis, when they demonstrate difficulty in removing themselves from their selfobject transferences (Muslin, 1986, 1987).
Self/selfobject fixations involve the self's development in relation to its selfobjects and therefore to the successes or failures of those dyads. Whenever there has been failure in either the establishment of the self/selfobject bond or the interiorization of specific selfobject functions, the self will be devoid of those internalized selfobject functions; the self will not have gained structure and therefore continues to need and to search for the missing functions to maintain optimal self-life.
Our basic research query centers on the attraction that compels people who have been deprived of selfobject support repeatedly to seek out or unconsciously manufacture (resurrect) the dyad of deprivation in which, as in the early days, the self will posture itself in an