Ronald Fairbairn wrote a complete psychoanalytic model in a series of papers (1940, 1941,1943, 1944) which are collected in his 1952 text Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality
[22]. His model explains the surprising psychological reality that abused children become deeply attached to their abusers. He saw that lack of love, chronic indifference and abuse led to a counter-intuitive emotional attachment to the very parent who was abusing them. The child’s unmet dependency needs from chronic emotional deprivation as well as the complete lack of other human alternatives in his/her environment, forces the child to focus intensely on the abuser, and paradoxically, to become concerned for the abuser’s welfare. This concern derives from the child’s sense of the danger that he is in, and the reality that his welfare is completely dependent on the whims, moods and emotional state of the abusive parent. Anything that he can do to placate, please or draw praise from the abuser increases the child’s chance of survival.
The neglected or abused child’s utter helplessness and absolute dependency upon the goodwill of their parents prevents him/her from “seeing” or remembering those interpersonal events in which they have faced indifference or physical abuse, as their anxiety would overwhelm them and submerge them in a torrent of dread. This feeling of dread is most often experienced as a massive abandonment panic during those moments when the child realizes that he/she is living in constant danger with no one to help him/her to survive. The solution to this enormous problem is for the child to encase himself/herself within a thick psychological cocoon of denial and fantasy that creates a false reality in which he/she believes that they are living in a loving and caring family.
The first way that the child protects itself is by using the greatest reality -altering defense that humans have at their disposal, which is the defense of
dissociation. The dissociative defense mechanism is seen in adults who have suffered a life threatening trauma, and it prevents them from fully realizing what has happened. In children, the same defense forces intolerable memories of neglect, abuse or total indifference that they experienced in relation to their parents into their unconscious, where these memories will not disturb the child’s illusion that he /she lives in a safe and loving family. The dissociative defense is the basis of what is commonly called denial. The more frequent the abuse, the more frequently dissociation is required and the larger and larger the number of intolerable memories are forced into the unconscious. Once lodged in their unconscious, the child cannot remember the horrifying incidents that they previously experienced.