Susan Bliss

THE ‘INTERNAL SABOTEUR’:

CONTRIBUTIONS OF W. R. D. FAIRBAIRN
IN UNDERSTANDING AND TREATING
SELF-HARMING ADOLESCENTS

Self-harming adolescents pose a great concern to social workers with their frequently
dangerous behaviour, and difficulties engaging in treatment. This article attempts to use
the contributions of W. R. D. Fairbairn, in particular his concept of the ‘internal saboteur’,
to explicate further the conflicts and anxieties underlying the often perplexing behaviour of
these young people. Fairbairn’s ideas are also used to examine and guide treatment methods
with this population. The use of transference and counter-transference to understand better
previously disowned aspects of the adolescents is discussed. Despite its clinical usefulness,
Fairbairn’s ideas have been largely neglected in the social work literature. This is a
problematic omission since Fairbairn offers important insights into understanding and
treating the self-harming adolescent. This study presents some of Fairbairn’s most important
concepts and illustrates them through the use of case vignettes from an outpatient practice.

Keywords adolescents; object relations theory; self-harm; W. R. D. Fairbairn;

internal saboteur; counter-transference

Adolescent self-harm is an area of increasing concern for social workers, families,

schools, and society (Lloyd-Richardson et al., 2007). In addition to cutting and
burning, adolescents engage in many forms of self-harm, including eating disorders,
drug use, sexual risk taking and physical risk taking. Adolescence is commonly
accepted as a period of upheaval, as adolescents work toward separating psychologically
from parents and forming their own identities. However, self-harming adolescents
have particular difficulties successfully negotiating this developmental phase.
These adolescents are clearly in need of intensive help, and yet psychotherapy is
often fraught with difficulty as they fight intensely against any form of assistance.
Clinical social workers need theoretical models that will allow them to understand the
deeper meanings of the adolescents’ communications, and treatment strategies to
enhance therapeutic engagement. While self-harm is clearly multi-determined,
with biological as well as environmental roots, this article attempts to understand
adolescent self-harm from an object relations perspective, focusing on the work

Journal of Social Work Practice Vol. 24, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 227–237
ISSN 0265-0533 print/ISSN 1465-3885 online q 2010 GAPS
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/02650531003741744
228 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

of W. R. D. Fairbairn. Further, the paper explores how this theoretical model can be
used to inform treatment strategies aimed at decreasing self-harming behaviour. Also,
during a period when short-term models of treatment and symptom relief have been
popular, this model serves to assist clinicians in understanding the relationship issues
which underlie symptoms, and offers a treatment model which takes a more holistic
approach to address issues these adolescents face with self-esteem, relationships, and
their behaviour.

Fairbairn’s theory of object relations

Object relations theory, which developed out of Freudian theory, focuses on the
primary role of relationships in understanding human motivation and behaviour.
This emphasis makes object relations theory a natural fit for social workers since we
have long understood the formative and transformative nature of relationships in
understanding human behaviour. Seminal object relations theorists, such as Melanie
Klein, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Otto Kernberg and others, while
espousing some important differences, share a common belief that early experiences of
the self and others are internalized, and later replayed with important people in the
individual’s life (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
The writings of one theorist, W. R. D. Fairbairn have been overshadowed by many
other theorists, but nonetheless have made a significant contribution to object relations
theory. While a complete outline of Fairbairn’s contribution is beyond the scope of this
article, it will attempt to explicate several central ideas that are important to
understanding self-destructive adolescents. For a more complete review of Fairbairn’s
thinking, see Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) and Grotstein (1993).
Fairbairn lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, and wrote between 1930 and 1960. Many
feel he was one of the first object relations theorists to reject completely and directly
Freud’s ideas that the biological drives of sex and aggression are the central motivators
of human behaviour. To Fairbairn, humans had a paramount need to relate to each
other, and this need formed the basis of his theory (Fairbairn, 1952a). Fairbairn
expressed this best by quoting a patient ‘You’re always talking about my wanting this
and that desire satisfied; but what I really want is a father’ (Fairbairn, 1952b, p. 137).
Fairbairn postulated that as long as early relationships are satisfactory, the ‘central ego’
or ‘I’ remains whole. By satisfactory, Fairbairn meant that carers are emotionally
available and gratifying. Fairbairn used the term ego in keeping with the Freudian
nomenclature of the time but, in fact, his conceptualization is very close to the
traditional concept of ‘self’. This primary self is the part of the ego that contains
conscious as well as unconscious elements, and relates to the outside world of ‘real’
external objects (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
Fairbairn observed, however, that if individuals had unsatisfactory early
relationships, they were faced with a difficult conflict. They experienced tremendous
aggression toward the very figures that they so desperately needed. Because they
perceived their relationships with caretakers as tenuous, they were unable to risk losing
the caretaker further by expressing their anger or disappointment. As a result, such
individuals need to ‘split off’ and repress both the experiences and feelings related to
the ‘bad object’ or disappointing other, and the linked part of their ego, (such as the
 THE ‘INTERNAL SABOTEUR’ 229

experience of being rejected/unloved, or feelings of longing and need) which

correspond to those bad experiences.
The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of the other are split in individuals’ minds, so that
they can hold onto a loving version of the other without undue anxiety or conflict, and
without risking losing the parent on whom they are dependent. The split-off ‘good’
internal object is termed the ‘ideal object’ and stays in contact with the central ego.
The central ego, or self, strives for perfection in order to meet the demands of the
‘ideal object’. Individuals unconsciously believe that if they meet these ideals they will
finally receive the gratification and connection they long for from the other. Fairbairn
called this the ‘moral defence’. However, this psychic manoeuvre clearly creates other
difficulties for adolescents who, under the influence of the ideal object, place
tremendous pressure on themselves for perfection, and fall apart when they perceive
themselves as falling short of their high expectations (Grotstein, 1993).
For example, one adolescent, whom I saw in an outpatient private practice, had
recently started a new job. She asked for feedback from her boss about her
performance. He told her ‘so far so good’. This sent the adolescent into a depression
and she immediately began to cut herself, because she interpreted his message as proof
of her ‘failure’. She insisted that his feedback was ‘damning her with faint praise’, and
that he clearly meant to convey that she was inadequate since he had not raved about
her performance. She felt if she was not the best employee he had ever had, she was a
complete and utter failure. This is an example of the ‘ideal object’ at work, persecuting
the individual with unobtainable expectations.
The ‘bad’ aspects of self and other are repressed so that the individual can protect
him or herself from these painful experiences. This is often seen in children whose
parents who are abusive. Instead of being angry with the parent, these children will
defend them, idealize them and cling to them as idealized good objects. Meanwhile,
they blame themselves for the abuse (the internalized bad object which becomes
the internalized ‘bad self’). As Fairbairn famously put it ‘it is better to be a sinner in
a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil’ (Fairbairn,
1952c, p. 66).
The problem is that the repressed ‘bad’ aspects of self and other never disappear.
Even when they remain outside of conscious awareness, they are continually kept alive
through action and enactment (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). For example, the father
of an adolescent boy recently moved to the other side of the country to be with his new
girlfriend. The adolescent insisted to me that he had no feelings about his father’s
move, and in fact, claimed to completely ‘understand’ his father’s need to relocate.
Meanwhile, after learning that his father was moving, the adolescent’s acting-out
behaviour increased dramatically in the form of drug use and setting small fires.
Fairbairn would understand this response as the adolescent’s need to ‘split off’ and
disown the feelings and experience of being rejected by his father. While keeping a
conscious idealized mental image of the father, the ‘bad’ object and related self-
experiences are repressed. Rather than feel the pain of the father’s destructive
abandonment, the adolescent identifies with or becomes the bad object, acting out his
anger and destructiveness, but with no access to his original feelings.
230 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

The endopsychic situation

Fairbairn called the internal world of the individual the ‘endopsychic situation’, a term
he used to describe the structures of the ego (or self) in relation to the internalized bad
objects. He had a very clear idea of how ‘endopsychic structure’ is formed. He asserted
that the first step involves the splitting of good and bad objects and the repression of the
bad object representations. The ‘central ego’, or ‘I’, which relates to the environment,
must repress the bad objects in order to preserve good relationships in the ‘real world’.
According to Fairbarn, the endopsychic situation consists of three egos: ‘a central
(conscious) ego attached to the ideal object (ego-ideal), a repressed libidinal ego
attached to the exciting (or libidinal) object, and a repressed antilibidinal ego attached
to the rejecting (or antilibidinal) object’ (Fairbairn, 1963, p. 156).

The exciting object/libidinal ego

Fairbairn postulated that once repressed, the internalized bad objects split again into
two parts. The first part is the ‘exciting object’ or needed object, which continues to
‘tempt and allure’ the individual with the hope that he or she may have his or her needs
met. Ultimately, however, the exciting object is still disappoints. The ‘exciting object’
is linked to what Fairbairn called the ‘libidinal ego’, the part of the self that contains the
feelings of neediness, longing and a perpetual hope for gratification. In the term
‘libidinal’, one can hear the influence of Freud’s theory of drives, particularly libido as
the sexual drive. But since Fairbairn rejected Freud’s theory of drives, he used the term
in an entirely different way, where libido means a ‘drive’ toward relationships; it is the
object-seeking aspect of self. So the ‘libidinal ego’ is actually a part of the self that is the
object seeking, or needy part of the self and contains feelings of intolerable longing
(Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).

Rejecting object/internal saboteur

The second part of the split bad object is the ‘rejecting’ object, or the experience of a
disappointing other, that is associated with a part of the self, that Fairbairn called the
‘anti-libidinal ego’ or ‘the internal saboteur’. Just as the ‘libidinal ego’ is the part of
the self that is seeking a relationship, the ‘anti-libidinal ego’ is the part of the self that
attacks the other, needy part of the self. Thus, the term ‘internal saboteur’ perfectly
captures how this part of the self functions. It hates all need, and seeks to destroy the
healthy part of the self that seeks connection with the other, and hopes to have his or
her relational needs met. The internal saboteur is the enemy of hope (Greenberg &
Mitchell, 1983).
One adolescent described this internal conflict clearly when she explained that her
suicidal ideation would immediately follow her thoughts of missing, and longing for,
her ex-boyfriend. As soon as she would experience this need in herself, she would
begin to attack herself, thinking, ‘you are such a loser, you need to die’. She would
stand in front of the mirror looking at herself repeating, ‘you need to die, you need to
die’. The internal saboteur, that hates and attacks the needy part of the self, is clearly
at work here. Similarly, adolescents often cut when they feel upset by the absence
 THE ‘INTERNAL SABOTEUR’ 231

of an important person. While cutting is multi-determined, adolescents often express

that in addition to being angry with the person for leaving, they are aware of being
angry with themselves for allowing such need and dependency in the first place.
The cutting seems to represent, at least in part, an attack on the needy, libidinal
aspect of the self. Rather than deal with the disappointment in the other, the
adolescent avoids dealing with the external conflict in the relationship, and instead
internalizes the conflict, thereby precipitating an internal war between the libidinal
ego that longs for connection, and the internal saboteur, which hates longing of any
kind and seeks to destroy it. The symptoms of self-harm can be seen as the internal
saboteur’s attempt to silence the need, rid itself of the longing, whether it is through
starving oneself (I need nothing, not even food), drug use (I am in a fog and am not
aware of needing anything, except for my drug of choice, onto which I transfer all
need), or cutting (I hate the need in myself and the pain of cutting punishes me for
experiencing it).
Paradoxically, these same symptoms adolescents use to fend off their neediness in
compliance with the internal saboteur, also tie them to others and this prohibits them
from growing up. While the wish for nurturance is outside of the adolescents’
awareness, their self-destructive behaviour makes them more dependent on others,
who hold all of the anxiety about their worrisome behaviours, and thus, focus on
‘taking care’ of them more than ever.
This conflict between the wish for connection (libidinal ego), and the fear of
depending on others (internal saboteur) is evident again and again in adolescents who
self-harm. For example, while in treatment, a bulimic young woman of 14 who
recently discovered her father’s affair, was dealing with the subsequent loss of both her
father (as he moved out) and her mother (who sank into a deep depression and self-
medicated with alcohol). The adolescent told me that she did not really care much
about her father’s affair, and ‘had no feelings about it’. At the same time she binged
several times a day, and could not stop herself from eating whatever she could find in
the refrigerator, including cupcakes that were still frozen. The internal saboteur cannot
allow her to express her longing for her father and mother, so instead, she attempts to
meet her enormous need for nurturance through eating. But she cannot stand her
neediness, and describes her disgust when she thinks about the part of herself that could
want and need food. Her purging relieves her sense of ‘badness’ for needing anything,
and she relishes in the ‘punishment’ of her vomiting, saying that it relieves her sense of
self-hatred for succumbing to her need for food. Here we see the internal saboteur in
action, punishing the self for being needy, and re-establishing her denial of
dependency.
As we know, all adolescents experience some form of a conflict between the need
for dependence on others and the developmentally appropriate need to stand on their
own. Nonetheless, most adolescents find a balance between allowing some of
their needs to be expressed and met, without feeling that doing so is a threat to their
autonomy. Adolescents that self-harm are stuck in an intense fight for their autonomy,
at the expense of the ability to depend on others. For them, the internal saboteur
squelches all attempts to allow connection and nurturance, leaving them more
vulnerable and needy than ever underneath their ‘tough’, self-sufficient, exterior.
Understanding these underlying dynamics can greatly assist social workers in working
with these challenging adolescents.
232 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Empirical support for self-harm as an attack on the self

Empirical data also supports the idea that self-harm is related to an internalized attack
on the self. In a comprehensive review of research studies on self-injury, Klonsky &
Muehlenkamp (2007) note that individuals who self-injure are prone to both negative
emotionality and self-derogation. Self-harming individuals are more likely to
experience emotional dysregulation, depression and anxiety. They are also particularly
prone to be self-critical and to experience self-directed anger or dislike. Self-injury has
been linked in several studies (Soloff et al., 1994; Herpertz et al., 1997; Klonsky, 2007)
to self-derogation. Furthermore, consistent with the current hypothesis that adoles-
cents with a variety of self-harm symptoms share a similar underlying dynamic
involving the ‘internal saboteur’, studies have indicated that individuals suffering from
substance abuse are more likely to self-injure (Langbehn & Pfohol, 1993). In addition,
there is evidence that adolescents with eating disorders may be triggered to binge and
purge by the same negative emotions that trigger self-injury (Mitzes & Arbitell, 1991;
Jeppson et al., 2003). Other researchers have identified a correlation between eating
disorder symptoms and self-injury (Whitlock et al., 2006). While these are preliminary
correlations, the currently available research suggests that there may be one dynamic
underlying multiple varieties of self-harm, specifically, an attack on the self. This
hypothesis supports the idea that therapists must be attuned to how the internal
saboteur works when treating adolescents who present the many different symptoms
that involve self-harm.

Transference/counter-transference
Fairbairn (1952c) thought that all psychopathology stems from internalized bad
objects, and that psychotherapeutic change occurs through the release of the bad
objects from the unconscious. He observed that, in treatment, the release of the
bad objects occurs when they become available in the transference. The fact that the
analyst is a ‘good’ and secure object to the patient, allows the re-emergence of the bad
objects. Unfortunately, not many contemporary writers use Fairbairn’s theories in
discussing treatment approaches. Two notable exceptions are Scharff and Scharff
(1992) and Seinfeld (1990). In the following section I will describe how I use
Fairbairn’s ideas to inform my thinking in working with self-harming adolescents.
Understanding that these adolescents have tremendous anxiety about recognizing
their own needs, or relying on others, we immediately see that the prospect of
psychotherapy, in and of itself, is threatening to them. The therapist represents on the
one hand, the exciting object, tempting the adolescent with the hope that someone will
gratify him or her emotionally. However, precisely because this hope has been raised,
the internal saboteur must step in quickly to destroy the possibility of connection with
the therapist. The internal saboteur speaks through the adolescent in a multitude of
ways. Adolescents tell us that therapy ‘is a waste of time because you can’t possibly
help me’, or ‘talking about it doesn’t help, I just have to get through it on my own’.
Adolescents must deny their own need for help, while at the same time allowing the
therapists to feel, first hand, the disowned parts of themselves that contain their
 THE ‘INTERNAL SABOTEUR’ 233

feelings of rejection and need. In the transference, the therapist is a dangerous

‘exciting’ object, who holds out hope, but is sure to disappoint. In the counter-
transference, the therapist feels first hand the feelings of rejection and hopelessness
about connection that the adolescent has experienced.
One adolescent was able to speak to this directly, telling the therapist he felt like a
beggar on the side of the street, desperate for money. He imagined that the therapist
would hand him a dollar, which would feel wonderful, and hopeful, until the end of the
therapeutic hour when the therapist would snatch it away, leaving the adolescent in
worse shape than before, devastated by the disappointment. While most adolescents
are not to speak to this aspect of their need, it is important to know it is always an
anxiety for young people beginning psychotherapy.
Often, the only way the therapist can have a glimpse of the adolescent’s need, or
libidinal ego, is through the counter-transference, where the adolescent puts the
therapist in the position of holding the wish for the relationship and the need for
connection. The adolescent feels none of the need, and instead, ridicules the social
worker’s expression of hope for connection. One adolescent snapped ‘I think YOU are
the one with the issues, you are always going on about feelings, and wanting to meet
and talk, there is definitely something wrong with you’. Remarks like these often leave
the therapist feeling rejected, helpless and depressed. In these moments, it is important
to recognize that the adolescent is communicating in the best way he or she is able,
something about his or her own internal experience that cannot be owned. According
to Racker (1957), when the therapist identifies with the client’s self-representation,
the therapist is experiencing a ‘concordant counter-transference’. This is a common
counter-transference experience for therapists of adolescents who struggle with missed
sessions, silences, and other acting-out behaviours, as adolescents attempt to deposit
their own feelings of rejection and helplessness into their therapists. It is important
for social workers to remember that these are powerful moments of communication,
and when one is able to reflect on these experiences, they provide a rich avenue
for understanding.

Hanna
For example, a 14-year-old girl, Hanna, sought help because of her poor grades,
anxiety and depression. She also engaged in premature, casual, exploitative sexual
relationships, but claimed they meant nothing to her, and that she ‘didn’t mind’ when
boys failed to call her after a one night stand. She described herself as liking to help
others, and in fact, spent hours on the telephone each night helping friends with their
problems, while ignoring her own. Her schoolwork suffered, and she had few outlets
for her own feelings, never wanting to burden others. She said that she never minded
helping others, and in fact, never felt angry at all.
Parents were both caring, but she experienced her father as emotionally distant
and demanding. Her mother, by her own admission, was overworked, preoccupied,
anxious and forgetful. Hanna felt a need to care for her mother, and not burden her
with her own problems. Predictably, Hanna began the relationship with the therapist
as a ‘peer’. She engaged in philosophical discussions about psychology and helping
others, while at the same time tuning into the therapist’s needs and affective
experiences, for example, ‘you look tired, I think you need a vacation’. Her own
234 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

needs and feelings were conspicuously missing from the room, and she did not
experience them. They were safely put aside, expressed only in her symptoms and
behaviour.
Soon Hanna began to come late to sessions. Initially, she was five or ten
minutes late. Next, she came 15 minutes late, and then she began missing sessions
altogether at times. When that happened she would be completely nonchalant,
claiming this the lapse had no meaning. She never expressed regret. During this
period, I was feeling increasingly insecure, concerned about what I was not doing
well in the treatment, and increasingly annoyed with her seeming lack of concern
about me, or our relationship. While her missed sessions were multi-determined,
I gradually came to realize that much of what I was experiencing was similar to how
she felt in relationships. This was a concordant counter-transference, where I was
identifying with disowned parts of Hanna. Her insecurity and anger were now in the
room, but I was experiencing them. Her parents were busy and preoccupied, and
she often felt like an afterthought, as did I, when she sauntered in late, more
interested in her iPod than in me. Boys often used her, and showed no concern for
her experience in the relationship. I too was feeling that she had little regard for the
work we had been doing and I felt dumped after having, sometimes, connected
intensely with her. Eventually, by being able to speak to her about how
I experienced her absences, I was able to make a connection with some of the
difficulties she was facing. For the first time, Hanna spoke about her annoyance with
her mother because she was always on her cell phone, and always late. In addition,
she was even able to begin to explore her feelings about boys not calling her after
intimate encounters.
As Renick (2006) has pointed out, sometimes the therapist has to ‘go first’ in
expressing vulnerability before the client can own, speak to, or even access his or her
own vulnerable experiences. This is even more important in work with adolescents.
With the internal saboteur ready to strike, one must open up psychic space that can be
used to put words to what is being enacted. By acknowledging her or his own
vulnerability, the therapist models for the adolescent that such feelings are acceptable,
understandable and containable, paving the way for further mutual exploration.

Engaging adolescents who self-harm

Engaging an adolescent who sees help and hope as dangerous to the self is clearly
challenging. Success depends partly on the therapist’s ability to begin by truly
understanding the adolescent’s anxiety about connection, and placing him or herself
firmly on the side of helping the adolescent to grow up and separate. The social worker
must convey clearly that help is not synonymous with being helplessly, and ultimately
disappointingly dependent on the therapist. The message is that the therapist is on
the side of autonomy, and that need and autonomy can actually live side by side.
For example, thinking again about the adolescent who feels like a beggar, the therapist
might state that instead of being the one to give the adolescent a dollar, he or she wants
to help the adolescent figure to make his or her own money so that the adolescent will
be able to get off the street. While later in the treatment there is a need to help the
adolescent be more in touch with his or her own need for connection, engagement
 THE ‘INTERNAL SABOTEUR’ 235

depends on the therapist initially siding strongly with autonomy, thus lessening the
internal saboteur’s need to attack.

Gaining access to the libidinal ego

While at the start of treatment, the social worker must side with the adolescent’s
need for autonomy, there is a point at which it becomes important to help the
adolescent understand more about the longings that she or he has shut away. While
there is no one formula to accomplish this, there are some helpful guidelines. One
place the repressed needs of adolescents often make themselves known is through
their dreams. Fortunately, in my experience, adolescents love to talk about their
dreams and one can often engage their curiosity about a dream’s multiple meanings.
Somehow seeing parts of themselves through the ‘television screen’ of the night
seems to allow them enough distance to talk more about some disavowed parts of
themselves.
Let us consider, for example, the substance-abusing adolescent whose father had
moved to another state. The teenager denies any worry about the negative effects of his
increasing substance use to his therapist. He comes late to a session, apologizing for
being late, and explaining he has just woken from a nap, and a dream. The dream is that
he is in the basement of his home, with the lights out. He has smoked excessive
amounts of pot in the dream and begins to get worried about how he will ever get up
off the sofa. He worries he will stay stuck there. His mother comes down the steps and
turns on the lights. She expresses concern and offers to help him up. For a moment, he
feels relieved, but then, tells her to leave, and to turn out the lights. And that ends the
dream. He casually asks what I think it means. Together we work toward some
understanding. I remind him that in the last session I commented that he has a way of
‘keeping me in the dark’ about his difficulties, which does not allow me to help him.
With some additional work he began to hear that maybe the dream did express a part of
him he did not often acknowledge; the part of him that thought his substance use might
not just be something to help him ‘rebel’ and move away from his parents, but might
actually be keeping him ‘stuck’ and unable to move forward. This dream then became a
theme we could come back to at times when he was seemingly unconcerned about his
dangerous behaviour, or at times when he again would push me out, tell me to leave
and thereby keep me in the dark.
While this dream, like all dreams, has so many possible meanings, it does seem to
capture the adolescent struggle between the wish for help and the internal saboteur’s
need to destroy this hope for connection and assistance. Similarly, poetry, music and
art are often the medium through which adolescents can express parts of the self that
otherwise are disowned. For example, Hanna frequently brought her artwork or music
to therapy at times when she had the most difficulty expressing her own needs and
anger. In contrast to her statements that she ‘had no anger’ her artwork expressed a
different side of her. She drew figures screaming, but with no one to hear them, and
she drew red splotches of blood on pages, that expressed the pain she could not yet put
into words.
236 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Naming the internal saboteur

Once adolescents are able to begin to own their need, painful feelings, or wish for
connection, the social worker can speak more directly about the conflict within, and
name the internal saboteur. Naming the self-destructive part of the self is crucial in their
developing an awareness of it, and also in helping the adolescent realize that it is only one
part of him or her. There is another healthier side that would like them to grow up, live,
eat and have relationships. Adolescents often come up with their own names for this
part of themselves, for example, ‘the mean one’ or ‘Darth Vader’. Developing a
conversation about parts of the self is essential in helping the adolescent to identify and
heal the split within, and to feel deeply understood by the social worker. One day
Hanna, who was quite a gifted writer, brought in a story about a cruel prison guard, who
was quite abusive toward a young incarcerated girl. The guard would verbally abuse her,
kick her and deprive her of food. Slowly, after some discussion of the story, Hanna was
able to see that the prison guard represented a part of herself; a part that was constantly
attacking and punishing another part which was in need of care. She also recognized that
she did this to herself, by putting herself into abusive relationships. We could return to
this metaphor again and again when she recognized that she was treating herself in much
the way the prison guard had, or allowing others to do the same.

Conclusion

This article explores the use of an aspect of Fairbairn’s object relations theory, and in
particular, the internal saboteur, to explicate the dynamics underlying self-destructive
behaviour in adolescents. The self-harming behaviour is conceptualized as an internal
conflict between the libidinal ego, or needy part of the self, and the internal saboteur,
the part which cruelly attacks the libidinal ego as it seeks connections with others.
Fairbairn’s theoretical viewpoint is helpful in understanding the otherwise deeply
perplexing behaviours this group of individuals bring to treatment relationships. At a
time when there is a growing emphasis on alleviating the symptoms of self-harm
without a clear conceptualization of its underlying etiology, Fairbairn’s theory offers
social workers a theoretical model for understanding and treating these difficult to
engage adolescents.

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Gerald Schamess, MSS, Professor Emeritus, Smith College

School for Social Work.

References
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 THE ‘INTERNAL SABOTEUR’ 237

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