Editing Object relations theory (section)

===Fairbairn's theory of attachment===
Fairbairn described how people who were abused as children internalize that experience. The "moral defense" is the tendency seen in survivors of abuse to take all the bad upon themselves, each yielding the moral evil so the caretaker-object can be regarded as good. This is a use of [[Splitting (psychology)|splitting]] as a defense to maintain an attachment relationship in an unsafe world. In one particular example of this circumstance, Fairbairn introduced a four-year-old girl who had suffered a broken arm at the hands of her mother to a doctor friend of his, who told the little girl that they were going to find her a new parent. The girl, now panicked and unhappy, replied that she wanted her "real mommy." Fairbairn asked, "You mean the mommy that broke your arm?" "I was bad," the girl replied.<ref name="Columbia University Press">{{cite book|last1=Celani|first1=David|title=Fairbairn's Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting|date=2010|publisher=Columbia University Press|isbn=978-0231149075}}</ref> From this exchange, he theorized that she needed to believe that her love object (mother) was entirely good to firmly believe she would one day receive the love and nurturing she needed—in an attempt to recuperate these needs, she used the moral defense to make ''herself'' bad in order to preserve her mother's goodness.