How does the self take form?

Also: how, and from whom, do we get that that understanding? And why does it matter?

Salam and hello. Long time… !

I’m getting back to a regular writing routine this year, God willing. In the meantime, here’s a recent essay I wrote for my course. It ranges across horses, Freud, modernity, Gaza, Fanon, mercy and fitrah (which is our innately healthy and sound nature). I hope you enjoy it.

---

How might an understanding of Object Relations theory support you to work at relational depth as a core process psychotherapist?

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

Unwanted behaviour

I started this year with a strong sense of intention: The deadlines are all in my calendar. I’m ordering the books early. I’ll make time to work consistently rather than last minute.

And yet… I don’t feel surprised to be typing the first words of this essay one week from the deadline.

I’m thinking about roots and origins of ideas and behaviours. Usually I would be castigating myself about not starting sooner, not having done more by this point. But right now, I can sense an inkling of understanding of the origins and roots of this pattern, and some recognition of the ways in which it’s been a useful adaptation. I can come into a softer relationship with it.

In a book I’ve been reading recently and have really fallen in love with, ‘Whole Heart, Whole Horse,’ its horse-trainer author had this to say to a horse owner about ‘problem behaviour’:

A lot of folks look at unwanted behaviour… as bad behaviour. But if we understand that horses can’t separate the way they feel from the way they act, then we can start to see that unwanted behaviour isn’t bad behaviour at all. More times than not, it’s just the horse expressing the way he feels at that particular moment in time. He’s just giving us information, that’s all.

(Rashid, 2009, p.10)

I can be in relationship with my inner horse, who behaves how he feels. I can be interested in what information his behaviour is conveying to me. Why is he stopping at the jump? I can see that I’m struggling with something.

Resistance and trust

There is an ever-present challenge in managing my time, energy and focus on this course in addition to a demanding and often stressful day job. But in addition to this, I know there’s been some strong resistance to this specific essay. I’ve chosen object relations as an essay title knowing that it emerged from Freudian thought. I feel suspicion and heaviness before even starting. It’s taken me literally months to get through reading the Freud chapter of the Lavinia Gomez book. Maybe it’s worth taking some time to understand this.

Gomez spells out the assumptions of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Some seem uncontentious, just stating the seemingly obvious about the mind - that mental life has an intrinsic structure, intrinsic laws. Other assumptions are less neutral – Gomez describes early Freudian thought as ‘materialist, treating psychology as at root a physical matter’ (Gomez, 1997, p.12).

For me, as someone who is devoted to living in a way that honours the Divine Principle and its reflection in the innate nobility of human nature, there is a strong resistance to these reductions. These are not unique to Freud by any means – they are also surrounding us and increasingly encroaching on us in the behaviouristic manipulations of social media, mobile apps and AI. Freud’s version reduces the idea of a Divine Principle to an infantile projection, and human consciousness to just the mediating mechanism between the biological instincts and irrational impulses of the id, versus the punishing and forbidding super-ego as the internalised voice of the parents.

So I find myself very interested in the question of where Freud’s ideas came from. It feels like the question that asking for some attention from me before I can make progress on this essay is: Can I trust these ideas?

Philosophical underpinnings of Freudian thought

Freud’s thought emerged not just from a specific cultural milieu, as discussed by Gomez, but also from an intellectual, philosophical and civilisational context that seems to be taken for granted. We can understand this as ‘modernity’.

My personal perspective is that of someone who is trying their best to reconnect to an indigenous psycho-spiritual paradigm that is non-Western and pre-dates modernity. So I want to challenge the unstated assumption that takes modernity as neutral.

Richard Tarnas (1996) explores the development of the modern world view from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, from the Renaissance and the Reformation through to the Scientific Revolution. I won’t list all of the tenets of the modern world view that Tarnas discusses, but to summarise five relevant ones – this world view holds that:

· the universe is impersonal, governed by natural laws and understandable in exclusively physical terms (in contrast to the medieval Christian cosmos, created and continuously governed by a God of love, miracle and redemption) - with natural laws not having as their cause an organising divine principle, but instead being generated by nature without any higher purpose;

· it sees the material and concrete become the focus of human activity, rather than the pre-modern dualistic emphasis on the spiritual and transcendent;

· science takes the place of religion as the authority. The Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment, saw reason replacing theological doctrine and revelation. Religion was now either an emotional salve (as Freud held), or a tool for social cohesion, or a psychological projection, or superstition;

· subjective mind vs objective reality become fundamentally distinct, with the human mind separate from and superior to nature, rather than a transcendent order being shared by both outer nature and the inner human mind (as understood by the Greeks and by other pre-modern non-Western traditions). Object relations would not exist without the Cartesian subject-object split;

· and finally, the theory of evolution is integrated into other fields - a view of nature as being in ceaseless struggle, change and development - with man no longer being from God but from lower forms of primates. Mind is now a biological tool that is a part of this struggle and governed by the laws of survival and natural selection, rather than being a divinely bestowed gift, an intellect in the image of a transcendent Intellect. Again, I don’t think the infant’s struggle to survive in the earliest months of life, in Klein’s view, would exist without the idea of ‘survival of the fittest.’

Tarnas concludes:

The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: … impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfill their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically “cleansed” of all spiritual and human qualities…. That world is the only kind of story that for the last three centuries the Western mind has considered intellectually justifiable. (Tarnas, 1996, p.421)

Why the long preamble?

Why is it important to me to understand these philosophical underpinnings and tenets before approaching Freud? Why have I spent such a large part of my limited word count on this?

I know that some of it comes from a position of scepticism and distrust. I consider myself, among many other people, an inheritor of an indigenous tradition of religious scholarship and wisdom that was systematically demolished by occupying powers wherever you care to look across the colonised world, as a direct consequence of the catastrophic rupture a few hundred years ago that Tarnas retraces. And you don’t have to share any particular identity or perspective in order to share the acute sense that there is something deeply wrong with the disconnected way we are living now.

What has this view of the world as mechanistic done to the world?

What has this view of the human being as a machine done to human beings?

I can see the answer playing across my phone screen in the images and videos from Gaza. The ones dropping the bombs, firing drones at children, setting tents on fire and raping doctors to death with fire extinguishers, have applied to themselves a dehumanization that is even worse than that they have inflicted. What have they done to others and to themselves would not have been possible without this worldview that splits us so radically from the other and turns us into machines, and some of us into killing machines. I reject this worldview absolutely, with all my being, as psychiatrist Frantz Fanon did in the opening pages of his 1952 classic Black Skin, White Masks:

…for all these findings and all this research have a single aim: to get man to admit he is nothing, absolutely nothing - and get him to eradicate this narcissism whereby he thinks he is different from the other “animals.”

This is nothing more nor less than the capitulation of man.

All in all, I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I reject the vileness of those who want to turn man into a machine.
(Fanon, 2021, p.6)

Source, being, self

An understanding of how the ego forms is important to understanding object relations theory, and to using it in therapeutic work.

Franklyn Sills begins his exploration of the self in the context of an inquiry into the nature of suffering - ‘Why do I suffer? Who suffers? Is there a way out of suffering?’ (Sills, 2009, p.4). This makes sense to me as a starting point. Suffering is part of the human condition, which I know from my own experience, and is so foundational a part of the human experience that the fact of it is the Buddha’s first Noble Truth.

Who is this self that suffers? Sills starts his discussion from tenets or assumptions than that seem to be the opposite of Freud’s, seeing life as ‘an inherently spiritual journey’ that ‘cannot be reduced solely to genetic, neurological or developmental processes.’ (Sills, 2009, p.5)

This assumption, an assumption of rootedness and connectedness, is an easier starting point for me. I can feel a physical easing in the route Sills takes into this material, only now recognising the tension I hold when I try to suspend this shared perspective in order to understand Freud’s ideas.

The three territories that Sills outlines are Source, being and self. Source is ‘a field of interconnectedness and openness at the heart of the human condition’ - inherent emptiness in Buddhism, or in other spiritual traditions, God / the Universal Principle / Creative Intelligence. Being is the sentience or awareness underlying my sense of self, which is connected to all other beings, ‘both innate and developmental in nature,’ arising from Source and a manifestation of it.

I can feel at this point the question arising in me: why does it matter that this idea resonates with me, that I agree with its cosmology or its metaphysics? Does that make it any more true? And does it make it any more valuable in this work?

I’m not sure there’s an objective answer to that. What writing this essay is confirming in me is that cosmology and metaphysics are central to me in how I approach this work. What is the purpose of this work? What do I think it can do for the other human beings whom I will be working with? I’ll return to this question in the conclusion of this essay.

There is so much in what Sills is saying here about being arising from Source:

It is Source that mediates being-to-being interconnection. Source manifests through being as natural compassion and loving connection. Source bestows meaning and allows being to imbue relationship with compassion. (Sills, 2009, p.6)

As I’m sitting here with this profound passage, an Arabic phrase is echoing in my head:

الرَّاحِمُونَ يَرْحَمُهمُ الرَّحمنُ

(ar-rahimun yarhamuhum ar-Rahman)

I look it up. It is a narration from the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. He said:

The merciful ones [or the compassionate ones] are shown mercy by the Most Merciful.

Be merciful on the earth and you will experience mercy from Who is above the heavens.

The womb is named after the Most Merciful[1], so whoever connects it, Allah connects him, and whoever severs it, Allah severs him.

(collected by at-Tirmidhi)

The Prophet peace be upon him is indicating the importance of nurturing ties of compassion (in Arabic, ‘the ties of the womb’) with family members. The way I read it, these compassionate ties are a vehicle for experiencing the compassion of the Most Merciful. Sills: ‘Source manifests through being as natural compassion and loving connection.’

I find it interesting that Gomez includes so much biographical information about the theorists she presents, including their (without exception) dysfunctional, acrimonious familial relationships. It doesn’t seem to be a by chance that later in life, some of these theorists assume that babies come into the world disconnected and are fighting to defend and survive; and other theorists assume that they come in connected, already knowing love, and already a channel for love.

I know which set of assumptions sounds healthier to me – which is more connected to the history of humanity and its spiritual rootedness across cultures and ages, until the great rupture that happened in Western Europe three hundred years ago, which has been atomising and destroying all alternative worldviews ever since.

Object Relations and the Spiritual Path

What kind of engagement is possible with the concepts of Object Relations from this more complete perspective that acknowledges Source as the ground of being?

· From the Freudian perspective, the ego only serves to mediate between the id’s instinctual drives and the super-ego’s constraints.

· Klein kept Freud’s framework of id, ego, super-ego, and the life and death instincts battling it out within the id, and elaborated on the mechanisms of projection, introjection and phantasy that the infant must develop to keep from being overwhelmed by this battle.

· For Fairbairn, the view of these drives in the framework of his dynamic endopsychic structure fundamentally differs from Klein and Freud. At the level of underlying assumptions, the ideas of the new physics are incorporated: that energy and matter are interchangeable, mind and body can’t be separated (the mental ego can’t be separated from the energetic drives of life) - so the ego is energy and the drives of libido are part of that energy. Fairbairn reframes the drives of libido not just as pleasure-seeking and tension-relieving, per Freud, but are relation-seeking, which takes centre stage as our primary drive.

It with this backdrop that Sills inquires into the process of self-formation - how the self becomes organized into the internal constellations that become ‘being’s way of being’. I found it really valuable because it explicitly identifies this question that has felt so important. Sills asks whether the ego forms as a result of instinctual drives (the Freudian perspective: biological, materialist, mechanistic)? Or is another approach possible, a more holistic view that includes the spiritual?

Sills summarises the value of understanding Fairbairn’s endopsychic structure as helping to develop an awareness of the nature of one’s own wounding and early unmet needs. This awareness ‘can bring real healing’, says Sills (2009, p.84) and a movement towards ‘a more direct experience of innate being as the hub of existence.’

Innate being is known in the Islamic tradition as ‘fitrah’. It is our nature which is inherently whole and healthy and always has been. It comes from the Arabic root letters fa-ta-ra, the root action denoting splitting, cracking open, and the word fitrah meaning literally creation, or the natural constitution with which a child is created in its mother’s womb. (Mohamed, 1996, p.14)

The most well-known narration in relation to this from the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him says:

No child is born but that he is upon fitrah,

and his parents convert him to Judaism, or Christianity, or Magianism,

as an animal delivers a perfect baby animal - do you detect any flaws?

(collected by Bukhari)

From birth for the next two years, until the formation of a separate sense of self, the child remains in this Fitraic state – a state of pure being / experiencing, without self. This experience of fitrah is then occluded by egoic identity and its attachments. The spiritual task of the adult human being, then, explains one of my teachers Dr. Yusuf Jha, is to work towards removing these occlusions ‘and return to what it always was - a soul through and by its Lord.’ (Jha)

My teacher refers to Margaret Mahler in particular, who was influential in Object Relations from her psychiatric work with young children, in which she developed the separation-individuation theory of child development. In this theory, the newborn child has no awareness of being an entity separate from its environment. Mahler refers to this undifferentiated experience as the symbiotic phase, lasting approximately 6 months. Jha sees this experience of a lack of separateness as being akin to the witnessing of God’s theophany that we all experienced before being born in the material realm - a unicity without separation.

Mahler then considers the psychologically separate identity of the child to develop slowly through its interactions with its environment, especially its mother, resulting in images forming within the psyche that eventually make a cohesive self-image. The stable, boundaried sense of self has formed by the final stage of the separation-individuation process, by the age of around three. Again Jha relates image formation to the task of the spiritual path:

The thirteenth century sage Ibn Ata Illah (d. 1309) in his famous collection Aphorisms, asks: ‘How can the hearts be illumined whilst the forms of creation are imprinted in its mirror?’

The clear and reflective mirror - the heart (or being) – has the fitraic function of reflecting the light of Source. When it does this, it perceives all being as inherently illumined by Source.

But it can blocked from this function, so that instead it sees ‘manifest rigid forms of this world as being circumscribed by their materiality’ (Jha), the darkened perspective of a self bound by its rigid self-constellations.

For Muslims, the process of spiritual reformation - returning to a mode of being rather than self, i.e. our fitraic nature - involves polishing the mirror of the heart of the imprints of created forms that stand in the way of our connection to the Divine – a polishing that is done by regular and consistent attention to, and remembrance of, our Source of being. This is our entire task in life - to make the return journey home to this primordial state of witnessing of the One.

Working at relational depth

How might all this help me to work at relational depth as a core process psychotherapist?

Sills sees awareness of the endopsychic structure as having the potential to help therapist and client hold their inner worlds with awareness and differentiation, which inevitably involves working with projection and introjection. I wish there was space to explore this kind of work in this essay!

But apart from that -

I see in Fairbairn and Sills’ views on the centrality of real relationship a rich potential resource for clients, particularly in our age of disconnection and relational poverty. Most of us are feeling the disconnecting effects of interacting with screens rather than human beings. ‘Relationships’ with AI chatbots (including ‘AI therapists’) are on the rise, but they are missing the crucial and essential and potentially healing elements of being-to-being relationship, and connection to Source.

Peter Kingsley says in Catafalque that all cultures have a sacred source and a sacred purpose, and that ‘nowhere on this planet are you going to find one single traditional culture that doesn’t remember, down to the finest detail, having its sacred purpose and source.’ (Kingsley, 2018, p.230)

We’ve been through enough this century that I hope we can now accept the role of psychotherapy– and it is literally therapeia meaning healing, and psyche meaning breath, spirit, soul) in reconnecting us to these sacred sources that give our lives meaning.

Bibliography

Fanon, F. (2021). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Penguin Books

Gomez, L. (1997). An Introduction to Object Relations. London: Free Association Books

Jha, Y. [No date]. Applying the Fitrah to Developmental Psychology. Unpublished.

Kingsley, P. (2018). Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity. London: Catafalque Press.

Mohamed, Y. (1996). Fitrah: The Islamic Concept of Human Nature. London: Ta-Ha Publishers

Sills, F. (2009). Being and Becoming. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books

Rashid, M. (2009). Whole Heart, Whole Horse. New York: Skyhorse Publishing

Tarnas, R. (1996). The Passion of the Western Mind. London: Random House

Hadith references:

at-Tirmidhi, Jami` at-Tirmidhi, Vol. 4, Book 1, Hadith 1924. See: https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:1924 [Last accessed 30/11/2025]

Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 2, Book 23, Hadith 467. See: https://sunnah.com/bukhari:1385 [Last accessed 30/11/2025]

---

[1] The Most Merciful is ar-Rahman; womb is rahim. The shared three-letter root is r – h – m.