ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein and W. F. D. Fairbairn are both original and important psychoanalytic theoreticians with an enormous influence on modern day psychoanalysis, where both are often intermingled. Fairbairn considered the original object to be the influencing other, co-determining all parts of life, the development of structure, psychopathology, and also emotional health. Fairbairn's theories change within his main works, due to development of his thinking over time. But one major point remained the same; the internalisations of object relations possess a compensatory character for unsatisfactory real object relations. It is often Klein who is regarded as the object relations theoretician though in actuality she represented a one-person model. For Klein object is considered to be preformed by drives and universal inherited predispositions. While Klein regards them to be immediate, Fairbairn considers them to be a secondary compensational phenomenon. Since the child previously projected his destructiveness, Klein argues, idealisation results from a schizoid defence mechanism in order to fend off persecution anxieties.
