What is the idea of “object relations” with regard to the Enneagram types?
A. Object relations are a theory of the ego (and ego development) pioneered in the 1940’s and 50’s by British psychologists W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Harry Guntrip, and others that has gained widespread acceptance and use in contemporary therapy. The basic idea behind object relations theory is that the ego-self only exists in relation to something else. In the first three years of life, we begin to distinguish and separate aspects of our experience, in the process of learning to distinguish our identity from that of others; more about this phenomenon was discovered in the course of studying the interactions of infants with their mothers. In the 1970’s, psychologist Margaret Mahler and her colleagues ran extensive studies on how a baby’s sense of identity developed; they learned that initially the baby cannot distinguish herself from her mother or from anything else, for that matter. The baby’s consciousness exists in what is called an “undifferentiated state.” There is only im
