Person
Ronald Fairbairn
Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent his whole career in Edinburgh, far from the London centre of British psychoanalysis, and became one of the founders of object relations theory. Against Freud he held that libido seeks objects rather than pleasure, and he replaced id, ego and superego with a structure of split-off parts of the ego bound to internalised objects, drawing on his work with schizoid patients and with abused children.
Read more- Born
- 1889
- Died
- 1964
- Known for
- Influenced
introduced
- Schizoid position 1941 Worked out in the papers of 1940 and 1941, where Fairbairn set a schizoid position alongside and beneath Klein's depressive position.
- Moral defence 1943 Introduced in the 1943 paper on bad objects and the war neuroses.
- Endopsychic structure 1944 Set out in the 1944 paper as the basic endopsychic situation, his replacement for Freud's structural model.
influenced
- Melanie Klein 1946 In her 1946 paper Klein acknowledged Fairbairn's work on schizoid states and took up his term, renaming her paranoid position the paranoid-schizoid position, though she disagreed with much of his theory.
- Harry Guntrip Guntrip became the leading expositor and developer of Fairbairn's object relations theory.
- Otto F. Kernberg Kernberg drew on Fairbairn's view of the mind as made of internalized relationships, split into separate ego–object units, for his own account of how primitive object relations are built into psychic structure.
developed
- Object relations theory Fairbairn recast psychoanalysis as a theory of object relations throughout, holding that libido seeks objects rather than pleasure; the US edition of his collected papers bore the title An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality.
- Splitting Fairbairn made the splitting of the ego, together with the splitting of the internalised object, the universal basis of mental structure.