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The concept of an internal object that perpetuates an atmosphere of intense mental pain, violence, and self-attack is explored in this article. Chronic self-attack, including attacks on linking, blocks the growth of a sense of personal agency that would ordinarily allow a person to receive help and to cooperate in his or her own analytic transformation. According to W. R. Bion, some patients give evidence of living with an internal object that is ego-destructive and that operates as a projective identification rejecting object. Bion names this ego-destructive internal object an obstructive object.
In the following sections I describe some implications of Bion's obstructive object idea. First I explore the central theme of learning in Bion's psychology with special attention to the role of projective identification as a form of communication in earliest life. Next, I review Bion's ideas about the phenomena of an obstructive object. Then, I sketch an obstructive object scenario as I am currently able to formulate it, offering a brief description from a case. Finally, I suggest that progress in working with the obstructive object scenario involves the analyst's capacity to become a projective identification welcoming object that the patient can use interpersonally and ultimately identify with.
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Bion's writing can be profitably read as the evolution of twin psychologies: one about the conditions that sponsor learning and emotional development, and another about the myriad obstructive forces and conditions, both internal and environmental, that lead to psychological stalemate, breakdown, or malignant transformation. A tension between learning (in the widest sense the evolution of the mind) and obstruction to learning expands from Bion's early group work all the way through his final papers.
The roots of Bion's interest in learning are no doubt to be found in his own autobiography. Such a study is beyond the scope of this article. However, even as a little boy Bion was a keen observer and a curious child. In his autobiography, The Long Weekend (1985), there are many moving vignettes about his curiosity, his sensitivity to his own emotional states as well as to those of others, his confusions over language, and his openness to impressions of all sorts.
Bion's war experience (beginning as a teenager) is a critical context for understanding the meaning that...