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Although Kohut held the view that “transmuting internalization” (Kohut, 1971, p. 49) was the means by which both healthy development and analytic cure proceeded, he did not—in contrast to theorists like Fairbairn and Melanie Klein in Britain, and Kernberg in the United States—develop a theory of internal object relations.
In one sense this need not surprise us. Klein and Kernberg, in differing ways, remain committed to drive theory, whereas self psychology may be seen (Bacal, 1990) as “a systematically elaborated ‘object relations’ theory where the significance of the link with the object that is experienced as providing a selfobject function is central” (p. 13). Drives are relegated to the periphery, or viewed as fragmentation products.
Furthermore, schemata of internal object relations such as Klein and Kernberg have proposed have an extrospective quality. We could think of them as hypothetical maps of psychic development in which “the development of ‘rewarding’ (libidinally gratifying) and ‘punishing’ (painful, frustrating, frightening experiences triggering aggression) experiences in the early mother—child interaction [develop] into early intrapsychic structures culminating in a set of structures representing ‘internal object relations”’ (Kernberg, 1972, p. 233). Such internalized object relations are considered “primitive” when “cathectic processes that involve object and self-representations are reflected in introjective-projective relatedness; primitive splitting supported by denial is the dominant mechanism of defense: and the presence of primitive splitting indicates failure to achieve a tolerance of ambivalence” (Volkan, 1976, pp. 29-30).