Concept
Schizoid position
Fairbairn's term for the earliest and most basic stance of the self, rooted in the infant's sense that its love is not received and may itself be destructive. The response is withdrawal from outer relationships into an inner world of objects, splitting of the ego, and feelings of emptiness and futility. Fairbairn held that this position underlies all psychopathology, more basic than the depressive anxieties Klein put at the centre.
Development
1941
Ronald Fairbairn introduced by
Worked out in the papers of 1940 and 1941, where Fairbairn set a schizoid position alongside and beneath Klein's depressive position.
Relations
- 1941 introduced by Ronald Fairbairn
Worked out in the papers of 1940 and 1941, where Fairbairn set a schizoid position alongside and beneath Klein's depressive position.
- gave rise to Paranoid-schizoid position
Klein's concept took its name, in part, from Fairbairn's schizoid position, but kept her own account of the death drive and early anxiety.
Works
- 1941
A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses
In this paper, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1941 and later collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952), Ronald Fairbairn gives the first systematic statement of the object-relations psychopathology he had begun to work out in his study of schizoid states. He argues that Karl Abraham's scheme of libidinal phases, then the standard framework of psychoanalytic psychopathology, mistakes means for ends: the erotogenic zones are channels through which the libido reaches its objects, not the determinants of its aims, and libido is primarily object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking. In its place he proposes a developmental scheme founded on the quality of dependence on the object. Infantile dependence is marked by primary identification with an object not yet distinguished from the self and by an incorporative, taking attitude centred on the breast; mature dependence is a relationship of giving as well as taking between a self and an object differentiated from it; and between them lies a transitional stage, in which the child is torn between the urge to leave infantile dependence behind and the urge to cling to it. Within infantile dependence Fairbairn places the origin of schizoid states in the early oral phase, where love itself is felt to destroy, and of depressive states in the late oral phase, where hate threatens the loved object. The obsessional, paranoid, hysterical and phobic conditions are not, in his account, fixations at particular libidinal phases but four techniques of the transitional stage, distinguished by whether the accepted and the rejected object are each treated as internal or external, and employed as defences against the more fundamental schizoid and depressive states.
- 1946
Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms
First published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1946 and reprinted, revised, in Developments in Psycho-Analysis (1952), this paper is Melanie Klein's account of the months that precede the depressive position she had described in the 1930s. In this earliest phase the infant's anxiety is predominantly persecutory and its defences predominantly schizoid; Klein names it the paranoid position, adding the term schizoid, which she takes from Ronald Fairbairn, and from 1952 calls it the paranoid-schizoid position. She holds that an ego capable of anxiety, defence and object relations exists from birth but lacks cohesion, and that its primary anxiety is a fear of annihilation arising from the death instinct within, which it deflects outward and then meets as persecution. Its chief defence is splitting: the object, at first the breast, is divided into a good and a bad one, and since the ego cannot split the object without being split itself, the same division runs through the self, sustained by idealisation, denial and omnipotent phantasies of annihilating what is bad. Klein here describes projective identification, the phantasy of forcing split-off parts of the self into the mother in order to harm, possess and control her, so that she comes to be felt as those parts; good parts of the self are projected too, which is necessary for good object relations but, in excess, depletes the ego. The paper traces how these mechanisms colour schizoid object relations and the transference, with their detachment and splitting-off of feeling, and argues that when persecutory anxiety and splitting are too strong the depressive position cannot be worked through, so that the fixation points of schizophrenia lie in this first position and are bound up with those of manic-depressive illness. Klein discusses Fairbairn's work at length, accepting much of his account of schizoid phenomena while objecting to his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct.
- 1952
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality is W. R. D. Fairbairn's only book. It gathers papers written in Edinburgh between 1927 and 1951, and its core, a series of papers from 1940 to 1946, sets out a systematic revision of Freud's theory in which the personality is understood through its relationships with objects rather than through the vicissitudes of instinctual impulses. Fairbairn's starting point is that libido is primarily object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking: the erotogenic zones are channels through which the person reaches for objects, and pleasure is a signpost to the object rather than the aim. On this basis he replaces Abraham's scheme of libidinal phases with a development from infantile dependence, grounded in primary identification with the mother, through a transitional stage to mature dependence, in which a differentiated person relates to others recognised as separate. Fairbairn holds that the schizoid position, in which the infant comes to feel that its own love is destructive, is more fundamental than the depressive position, where the danger lies in hate, and that it underlies all later psychopathology. Unable to bear dependence on parents who frustrate it, the child takes their bad aspects into itself so that the outer world can remain good, a step he calls the moral defence; repression is directed first at these internalized bad objects. The obsessional, paranoid, hysterical and phobic states are four techniques of the transitional stage for managing accepted and rejected internal objects. In the 1944 paper on endopsychic structure he replaces id, ego and superego with a model of a split ego: a central ego related to an ideal object, a libidinal ego bound to an exciting object, and an internal saboteur, later called the antilibidinal ego, bound to a rejecting object, the whole held in place by the central ego's repression and the saboteur's attacks on the libidinal ego. The later papers argue that energy cannot be separated from structure, that aggression is a reaction to frustration rather than an independent drive, and that treatment aims to release bad objects from the unconscious and to lessen the splitting of the ego through the relationship with the analyst. Earlier clinical papers and occasional pieces on social and wartime questions complete the volume. Published in the United States as An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality, it became one of the founding texts of the British object-relations school.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses1941 Evidence for a relation
- Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality1952 Evidence for a relation
- Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms1946 Evidence for a relation