ABSTRACT
This essay sets out the basic shape of the issues by reviewing the history of internal objects in British and American psychoanalysis. It attempts to show how the initial standpoint of psychoanalysis on the base of natural science (as understood at the end of the nineteenth century) rendered the nature of internal objects, their power to organise the psyche and the question of the commandingness of the values they represent, impossible to address adequately. The idea of the “superego” introduced values at the price of making them systematically alien to the ego. More recently, a more phenomenological approach and particularly the thinking of American psychoanalysts, such as Loewald, Roy Schafer, Stephen Mitchell and Jonathan Lear, have opened up new possibilities. The fact that different ethical values may be incommensurable, and that some are more commanding than others, requires a recognition of hierarchy within the psyche. The notion of “allegorical objects” is briefly introduced.
