The variety of positions that the role and function of the object holds is not easy to capture with a single definition. It engages all mental systems, particularly the involvement of the "id," since its initial investments will structure the rest of the mental systems.

This automatically raises the issue of the relationship between the internal-external object, internal-external reality. The other mental systems (ego, superego) are structured based on the investments of the "id" in external reality. The drive becomes established on its course towards the object, and thus it again takes position among the representatives of the drive.

The object represents the ego (lies opposite to it), while also opposing it. It is both foreign and familiar to the ego, a primary source of separation anxiety and abandonment, but also anxiety of penetration and invasion from the other side. The ego hates the object because it opposes it and loses its omnipotence.

It also hates it because it forces it to represent, in order to transform lack into absence, the quantity of trauma into quality of the psyche. It is a laborious task that the wounded narcissistic ego would prefer to avoid. The ego also hates itself, since it is a result of painful separation and allows the object to become autonomous.