Husserl's fifth Cartesianische Meditationen (the work was written in 1929, but was only published in German in 1950) is the philosophical locus classicus for the primordial world of simultaneous coexistence, where phenomenal ‘pairing’ (Paarung) gives rise to ‘a living mutual awakening and an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other’ (1950: 113). The thrust of my argument is set against the background of Husserl's phenomenology of ‘intersubjectivity’ (Intersubjektivität), which, in many respects, anticipates the principal findings of Independent object-relations theory. Husserl's view encompasses the body-ego and the object-world: ‘The other organism, as appearing in my primordial sphere, is first of all a body in my primordial Nature, which is a synthetic unity belonging to me and therefore, as a determining part included in my own essence, inseparable from me myself’ (1950: 121). Husserl (1950: 139) notes that living-with ‘involves being a plurality of monads that constitutes in itself an Objective world and that spatializes, temporalizes, realizes itself – psychologically and, in particular, as human beings – within that world’. I return to the primordial condition of ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung) throughout the book, although I treat the empathic relation between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ (Husserl's topic) as an elaboration of a more primitive emotional tie between the infant and the primary carer, what I call the dependence relationship.

Husserl continued to grapple with the fundamental problem of the other, the problem of intersubjectivity, formulating the matter more explicitly in his last work, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, as a problem of the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt). Husserl's analysis of the life-world, conceived as the prescientific world of experience, represents ‘a radicalisation of his analysis of intersubjectivity, insofar as concepts like historicity, generativity, tradition, and normality are given a central transcendental-philosophical significance’ (Zahavi 2003: 125). In this respect, empathy is essentially reframed in terms of our existence through living together:

The elaboration of ‘empathy’ as existing and acting together does not necessarily meet the criticism levelled at Husserl's constituting ego. Levinas (1974), most notably, found Husserl's notion of constitution problematic, and proposed instead that the ego of the person is constituted by the encounter with the other. I shall come back to Levinas in the following chapter. Suffice it to note here that the philosophical framework of my study effectively retraces the trajectory from Husserl to Levinas. In my analyses of dependence and relational being, of taking part in a meeting, I aim to apply, where appropriate, some of the seminal and ongoing debates in phenomenology to Independent psychoanalytic thought. Karol Wojtyła has made an outstanding contribution to these debates. The idea that ‘participation’ is a distinct feature of the person, that to be a person means to be capable of participation, represents a major advance in phenomenological inquiry. Essentially, the idea is that being and acting together-with-others discloses a fundamental dimension of oneself as a person. I consider Wojtyła's analysis of the person-action relation in the following section. The basic insight that the reality of our existing ‘together-with-others’ is a consequence of human reality itself augments the phenomenological insight as a whole. It also illuminates some of the more radical advances in post-Freudian thought, as I demonstrate in my analyses of Fairbairn and Winnicott in the following chapter.

My central thesis is that our understanding of the person, that is, of the person as it manifests itself in actions, is based on his or her relations to other persons (Spitz 1957). The person discloses himself through action only insofar as the personal unfolds in relations. Relations signify primordially who a person is and how he or she exists. The actions of the person, and the fulfilment of the person in the action, are rooted in and mediated by relationships. Infantile dependence emerges on these grounds as the defining preoccupation of Independent object-relations theory. Aside from the inevitable attempts to restrict the hypotheses of relationality and relational being to the classical Freudian model: the interconnected interpretation of the Oedipus complex, the repressed unconscious, the castration complex, the concept of penis envy, and so on, there is no evidence of a purely personalistic view in any of the major exponents of Independent thought. Accordingly, the equiprimordiality of human coexistence and dependence, exemplified in Fairbairn's description of the ‘suckling-situation’ and Winnicott's concept of ‘holding’, is the standing premise of my inquiry.

Stephen Mitchell (1988) provides a comprehensive account of the ‘object-relational matrix’ that underpins the English school. The principal findings of the Independent object-relations tradition of Fairbairn and Winnicott – i.e. the equiprimordiality of psychological dependence and human coexistence – are highlighted in Mitchell's (1988) broadly conceived ‘relational model’ of intersubjectivity. Mitchell eschews the idea of universal and inherent psychological meanings. Instead, ‘bodily experiences and events are understood as evoked potentials which derive meaning from the way they become patterned in interaction with others. From [the relational] viewpoint what is inherent is not necessarily formative; it does not push and shape experience, but is itself shaped by the relational context … the underlying structure of experience and its deeper meanings, derive from relational patterns’ (1988: 4; emphasis in the original). This describes a being whose existence is always and irreducibly relational; being-there is in each case mine but only insofar as it is related to the existence of someone; being-there is co-being.

Fairbairn and Winnicott laid the foundations for this perspective in Independent psychoanalytic thought. Fairbairn (1940: 10–11) proposed that the ‘first social relationship established by the individual is that between himself and his mother; and the focus of this relationship is the suckling situation, in which his mother's breast provides the focal point of his libidinal object, and his mouth the focal point of his own libidinal attitude’. Looked at from the point of view of object-relationship psychology, dependency is perceived not as an end in itself but as a means to yet more life. Starting with the early oral situation, the dependent infant is fundamentally helpless but, at the same time, has the makings of an active person. This discovery is evident in Fairbairn's (1946: 141) idea that the object to be found has first to be made, an idea that Winnicott developed in terms of ‘primary creativity’ and the ‘spontaneous gesture’. I shall come back to Winnicott's theory of spontaneity below.

In a comprehensive theory of worldmaking, the instinctual reach for life, understood as an expression of the ‘mouth ego’, rests on the child being assured, firstly, ‘that he is genuinely loved as a person by his parents’, and secondly, ‘that his parents genuinely accept his love’ (Fairbairn 1941: 39). The ‘good’ object is thus ‘both satisfying and amenable from the infant's point of view’ (Fairbairn 1944: 111). Fairbairn (1944: 93 n 1) maintained that the full potentiality of the self (‘central ego’), or the individual as a person, is realised only in relation to a mother (‘ideal object’) who meets her child's developmental needs, whose milk proves ‘sufficient to satisfy [the child's] incorporative needs’. Conversely, individuals displaying schizoid features, according to Fairbairn (1940: 23), ‘gained the conviction, whether through apparent indifference or through apparent possessiveness on the part of their mothers, that their mother did not really love and value them as persons in their own right’. Fairbairn's (1940: 13) singular insight is that the type of mother who is likely to provoke a regression to schizoid states is ‘the mother who fails to convince her child by spontaneous and genuine expressions of affection that she herself loves him as a person’. The child is therefore left with ‘a sense of lack of love, and indeed emotional rejection on his mother's part’ (Fairbairn 1944: 113–14; emphasis in the original).

Fairbairn (1940: 11) argued further that ‘in proportion as disturbances in the [mother-infant] relationship occur, the breast itself tends to assume the role of libidinal object; i.e. the libidinal object tends to assume the form of a bodily organ or partial object (in contrast to that of a person or whole object)’. For Fairbairn, part-objects (exciting and rejecting) emerge only where the child is faced with a more or less traumatic situation, excessively and cumulatively frustrated by an unreliable or uncaring mother. Assuming, however, that the child cannot survive childhood psychically without a ‘good’ object, and that it proves insufferable for the child ‘to have a good object which is also bad’, Fairbairn (1944: 110) proposed that the child ‘seeks to alleviate the situation by splitting the figure of his mother into two objects’. The mother who satisfies her child libidinally is experienced as a ‘good’ object; the mother who fails to satisfy her child libidinally, as a ‘bad’ object. The internal ‘bad’ object, in turn, is split into two objects – namely, ‘the needed or exciting object’ and ‘the frustrating or rejecting object’ (1944: 111). The role of ‘ultimate cause’ is assigned to the phenomenon of infantile dependence, rather than the explanatory concept of the Oedipus situation in the Freudian interpretation. In accounting for the origins of repression and the structuration of psyche, priority is assigned to the ‘problem of adjustment’, that is to say, those ‘measures adopted by the child in an attempt to cope with the difficulties inherent in the ambivalent situation which develops during his infancy in his relationship with his mother as his original object’ (1944: 120).

As a theory of dynamic psychical structure, Fairbairn's position is unambiguous: firstly, it is maternal deprivation, the breakdown of maternal capacity, that necessitates the defence mechanism of splitting in the child; and, secondly, the split-off self-states and part-object structures characteristic of the deprived child reveal the defensive and pathological nature of ‘differentiation’ at the beginning of life (Rubens 1984). Consider the following statements by Freud: ‘love strives after objects’ (1930 [1929]: 117); for the ego ‘living means the same as being loved’ (1923a: 58). This is essentially Fairbairn's point: human beings become human beings on account of their dependency needs being met by an appropriate response of love and care at the beginning of life, what Freud called the ‘function of protecting and saving’. Freud, of course, situated object-seeking and the function of mother as a protective shield within an instinct-based, drive/structure model; whereas Fairbairn addressed the satisfying object, the mother in her capacity of a good object, in the primary context of the dependence relationship. The main point here is that ‘it is only ego structures that can seek relationships with objects’ (Fairbairn 1944: 88). This accounts for the hate and destructiveness of the antilibidinal ego, which Fairbairn (1940: 24) treated as the outcome of failed object-relationships – including, not only an unloving environment but also the mother's failure to ‘appreciate and accept [the child's] love as good’. As a result, the world comprises what Fairbairn (1940: 26) described as the two ‘great tragedies’ to which persons with a schizoid tendency are liable: (a) the child's feeling that his love is ‘destructive of those he loves’ and (b) his becoming subject to ‘a compulsion to hate and be hated, while all the time he longs deep down to love and to be loved’.

My aim in this book is to open up the dialogue between Independent object-relations theory and the Freudian tradition. I discuss the object-relation in post-Freudian thought in the following chapter. In this chapter, I focus on the problem of the object in Freud – including, the extent to which Freudian drive theory was ‘a kind of object-relations theory’ (Mitchell 2000: ix), as well as a general theory of human action. In a similar vein, Pine (1990: x) proposes that ‘transference and the oedipal constellations are as much object relations concepts as they are drive concepts’. I shall keep this proposal in view throughout the book, while at the same time considering the challenge posed by the Independent tradition to the Freudian interpretation, most notably, in the work of Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Loewald. Suffice it to note in these introductory remarks the basic terms of the debate.¹ Fairbairn (1944: 126) provided the basic insight that ‘although Freud's whole system of thought was concerned with object-relationships, he adhered theoretically to the principle that libido is primarily pleasure-seeking, i.e. that it is directionless’. By contrast, Fairbairn (1941: 47) singled out infantile dependence as the defining feature of the human situation and, furthermore, identified the ‘unconditional character’ of dependency as its most prominent feature: ‘The infant is completely dependent upon his object … the very helplessness of the child is sufficient to render him dependent in an unconditional sense’.

Consequently, far from an explanation of non-directional ‘equilibrium-seeking’ activity, the concept of ‘libido’ was systematically and irrevocably decoupled from the Freudian theory of sexual and aggressive drives. Fairbairn (1941: 31) turned classic libido theory into ‘a theory of development based essentially upon object-relationships … The ultimate goal of libido is the object’. The relational matrix is conceived from the standpoint of dependency and, on these grounds, constitutes an innate ‘drive’ towards relationship: ‘libido is primarily object-seeking, i.e. it has direction’ (Fairbairn 1944: 126). Moreover, with respect to the relational field, erotogenic zones are conceived as ‘channels’ through which libido flows in its reach for life, or, what a...