ABSTRACT
Ronald Fairbairn correctly observed that Melanie Klein had failed to explain how incorporative phantasy could give rise to internal objects as endopsychic structures. Fairbairn appears not to go so far as to identify internal objects with ego-structures; he says that they acquire their dynamism from being cathected by ego-structures. Ogden and others have taken the further step of attempting to explain the dynamism of internal objects as a consequence of their identification with parts of the ego. Fairbairn always used the language of subsidiary egos, the language of mind. Most who have followed him have slipped into referring to these egos as part-selves, sub-selves or subsidiary selves. The ego is not split in reality, it is experienced as if it were split, a consequence perhaps of disssociative phantasies such as those underlying projective identification.
