Children are existentially dependent. If those on whom they must depend are unreliable or badly intentioned, they have a choice between accepting that reality or denying it. If they accept it, they may generalize that life is empty, meaningless, and uninfluenceable, and they are left with a chronic sense of incompleteness, emptiness, longing, futility, and existential despair. This is the anaclitic version of depressive suffering. If instead they deny that those they must depend upon are untrustworthy (because they cannot bear living in fear), they may decide that the source of their own happiness lies within themselves, thereby preserving hope that self-improvement can alter their circumstances. If only they can become good enough, can rise above the selfish, destructive person they know themselves to be, life will get better (Fairbairn, 1943). This is the introjective dynamic. Clinical experience attests resoundingly to the human propensity to prefer the most irrational guilt to an admission of impotence. The introjective depressive person feels bad but powerful in that badness, whereas the anaclitically depressed person feels victimized, powerless, and passive.
Nancy McWilliams – Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process p.241
The Sea Is Not Full 