Ronald Fairbairn

Fairbairn was born in Edinburgh on 11 August 1889, the only child of Thomas Fairbairn, a chartered surveyor who was president of the Edinburgh Architectural Association, and Cecilia Leefe. Jennifer Johns, in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, describes a middle-class household of strict Protestant values with a strong Scottish academic tradition. He was educated at Merchiston Castle School and at the University of Edinburgh. There he studied philosophy, and for three years divinity and Hellenic Greek, graduating MA in 1911. The same dictionary records further study at Kiel, Strasbourg and Manchester.

In the First World War he served with the Royal Engineers in the Palestine campaign, and then with the Royal Garrison Artillery. Edinburgh University Library records that he visited Craiglockhart Hospital, where W. H. R. Rivers was treating shell-shocked soldiers, and that these experiences apparently decided him on becoming a psychoanalyst. After the war he studied medicine at Edinburgh. The university gives 1929 as the year of his MD; the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis gives 1927.

Fairbairn never had a formal psychoanalytic training. As a medical student he was analysed by E. H. Connell, an Edinburgh psychiatrist, and he began to see patients for analysis in 1925. In 1926 he married Mary More-Gordon.

From 1927 to 1935 Fairbairn lectured in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, taking adolescence as his special subject. He also worked at the Clinic for Children and Juveniles, where he treated delinquent and sexually abused children. Edinburgh University Library describes him as a physician and medical psychologist in Edinburgh hospitals who lectured on psychology and philosophy before he moved into full-time private practice as an analyst. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1931.

His papers drew the attention of Ernest Jones and Edward Glover, who introduced him to the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He was elected an associate member on the strength of a paper in 1931, and a full member in 1939; the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis gives 1938. During the Second World War he worked in the Emergency Medical Service, and from 1941 to 1954 he was consultant psychiatrist to the Ministry of Pensions. His work with soldiers who had broken down in service went into his 1943 paper The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects².

Fairbairn worked in Edinburgh throughout his career and remained at a distance from the Society in London. Johns holds that this distance from the Society's conflicts let him develop original and independent ideas, and that recognition came towards the end of his life. His principal papers appeared between 1940 and 1946 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the British Journal of Medical Psychology. In 1952 they were collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality¹, published in London by Tavistock Publications with Routledge & Kegan Paul, and in 1954 in New York by Basic Books as An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality.

Among those he analysed were Harry Guntrip, who was in analysis with him from 1949 into the late 1950s, and the psychiatrist John D. Sutherland, who had a training analysis with him in Edinburgh. Sutherland later wrote Fairbairn's biography, Fairbairn's Journey into the Interior (1989). Fairbairn's first wife died in 1952, and in 1959 he married Marion Frances Mackintosh. He died in Edinburgh on 31 December 1964 and is buried in the Dean Cemetery with both his wives. The National Library of Scotland holds his papers, diaries and correspondence, including appointment books and records of consultations. His heavily annotated library, held at Edinburgh University Library, shows him reading his contemporaries closely and critically. Both collections have been catalogued with funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Fairbairn's first systematic statement of his views was A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses³ (1941). In it he argued that Abraham's scheme of libidinal phases, then the standard framework of psychoanalytic psychopathology, mistook means for ends. The erotogenic zones are channels through which libido reaches its objects, not the source of its aims. It is the relationship to the object that determines the libidinal attitude, and not the reverse. He kept the oral and genital attitudes as the natural channels of the infantile and the mature relationship. The anal and phallic phases he treated as artefacts, techniques for dealing with objects rather than stages of development. In the collected volume he put the same point by calling pleasure a signpost to the object rather than the aim (Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality¹).

In place of the libidinal phases he described a development defined by the quality of dependence on the object. Infantile dependence rests on primary identification with an object not yet distinguished from the self, and on a taking, incorporative attitude. Mature dependence is a relationship of giving as well as taking with an object recognised as separate. Between them lies a transitional stage. Fairbairn spoke of mature dependence rather than independence, since a life without need of objects is impossible. The transitional stage is a conflict between the urge to leave infantile dependence behind and the urge to cling to it, between fear of separation and fear of being absorbed. In it the object is divided into an accepted and a rejected object. The obsessional, paranoid, hysterical and phobic states are, on this account, not fixations at libidinal stages but four techniques of the transitional stage. They are distinguished by whether each of the two objects is treated as internal or external, and they serve as defences against the deeper schizoid and depressive states (A Revised Psychopathology³).

In the 1941 paper Fairbairn traced schizoid states to the early, sucking oral phase and depressive states to the late, biting phase. The schizoid person's problem is how to love without destroying the object by love; the depressive person's is how to love without destroying it by hate. He held that the schizoid position is more fundamental than the depressive position that Klein had put at the centre, and that splitting of the ego is universal (Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality¹).

The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects² (1943) moved the theory of repression onto the ground of object relations. Drawing on abused and neglected children and on soldiers with war neuroses, Fairbairn argued that what is repressed is first of all bad internalised objects, not impulses or painful memories. Impulses and memories are repressed because they are bound up with such objects. A child who depends on parents who neglect or mistreat it cannot afford to see them as bad. It takes their badness into itself, making the outer world safer at the price of persecution within. In the moral defence the child converts the unconditional badness of its objects into a conditional, moral badness of its own. It becomes the guilty one so that its parents can remain good, and because the badness is moral it can, in principle, be redeemed by good conduct. Fairbairn framed this as preferring to be a sinner in a world ruled by God to living in a world ruled by the Devil. The superego, built from internalised good objects, is the agent of this defence. Guilt thus becomes a defence against the more primitive terror of bad objects, and interpretation in terms of guilt can screen the deeper situation.

The same paper places the deepest resistance in analysis in the fear of releasing bad objects from the unconscious, a fear reinforced by the patient's attachment to them. Fairbairn likened the return of bad objects to the possession by demons that earlier ages described, and the psychotherapist to the successor of the exorcist. Treatment, he held, must bring about the release of bad objects within the transference, once the analyst has become a good enough object for the patient to risk it. He read the war neuroses in these terms. The soldiers who broke down were marked by infantile dependence, separation anxiety was their central symptom, and the dangers of war precipitated the breakdown by releasing bad objects repressed long before.

Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships⁴ (1944) turned these claims into a new model of the mind. Fairbairn argued that impulses are only the dynamic side of ego structures and cannot be considered apart from them or from the object relations they serve. The id therefore merges into an ego that is a source of energy from the start and oriented to reality from birth. The pleasure principle becomes a secondary principle that takes over when relations with objects fail. Since one part of the ego can repress another, repression implies a multiplicity of egos. Fairbairn held that Freud's structural theory, like Klein's depressive position, had been built on melancholia. Against both he put the schizoid position at the centre and called for a return to hysteria, whose dissociations he read as splits of the ego.

He drew the model from a patient's dream, treating dreams not as wish-fulfilments but as dramatised situations in inner reality. In what he called the basic endopsychic situation, a central ego, partly conscious, rejects and represses two subsidiary egos with aggression. One is a libidinal ego bound to a needed object, later called the exciting object. The other is an internal saboteur bound to a rejecting object. The internal saboteur in turn attacks the libidinal ego, an indirect repression that Fairbairn identified with the part of the process Freud had described. The situation arises in infancy from frustration by the mother. The infant internalises the unsatisfying object in order to control it, splits it into a tempting and a rejecting side, and represses both, together with the parts of the ego attached to each. Hatred openly expressed would risk losing the good object, and love expressed to a rejecting mother would risk humiliation and loss of the self. So the child turns a maximum of aggression against a maximum of libidinal need (Endopsychic Structure⁴).

Several revisions follow from the model. Splitting of the ego and repression are one process, driven by aggression. The libidinal ego's attachment to its repressed object is a resistance in its own right, which helps explain the negative therapeutic reaction. The Oedipus situation is an internal end-product rather than an ultimate cause, and both internal objects are at bottom figures of the mother. Fairbairn traced Freud's separation of energy from structure to Helmholtzian physics. He offered instead a psychology of dynamic structure: five structures and two forms of energy, libido and aggression. He later renamed the internal saboteur the antilibidinal ego. The later papers in the collected volume argue that aggression is a reaction to the frustration of libidinal needs rather than an independent drive, so that no death instinct need be assumed. Treatment aims to release bad objects from the unconscious and to lessen the splitting of the ego, which the patient can risk only within a relationship with the analyst as a good object (Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality¹).

Fairbairn rejected Freud's view of libido as pleasure-seeking and replaced the id, ego and superego with his own structure, while remaining within psychoanalysis. In the 1944 paper he cited Freud's own remark that love seeks objects. He treated Abraham's libidinal phases as the framework his theory of dependence was meant to replace (A Revised Psychopathology³).

His relation to Klein ran in both directions. In the 1941 paper he built on her ideas of internal objects and of the depressive position, while moving away from her reliance on the instincts. In Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms⁵ (1946) Klein discussed his work on schizoid states at length. She qualified the name of her paranoid position with his term schizoid, and from 1952 called it the paranoid-schizoid position. She agreed with him on the importance of schizoid phenomena and of the earliest object relations. She rejected his revision of instinct theory, however, and objected to his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct.

Harry Guntrip, whom Fairbairn analysed from 1949, became the leading expositor and developer of his theory. Guntrip later went to Donald Winnicott in London for an intermittent analysis from 1962 to 1968, and wrote an account of both analyses. John D. Sutherland, another of his analysands, wrote the 1989 biography. In 1994 David E. Scharff and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles edited his uncollected papers as From Instinct to Self.

The University of Edinburgh describes Fairbairn as a theory-builder for the Middle Group of British analysts, now called the Independent Group, whose concern was relationships between people rather than the drives within them. Edinburgh University Library notes that, unlike Freud, he set the problems of child psychiatry in the context of family and other social relationships. It also notes that recent research places him in a distinct Scottish tradition of thought about the self, alongside the philosopher John Macmurray and the psychiatrist Ian Suttie. Johns calls him "one of the most important founders of object-relations theory". She describes his influence as growing, in Britain and abroad, on the British Independent Group, attachment theorists, self psychologists and intersubjective theorists.

In Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis⁶ (1976), Kernberg placed his own model among the object-relations theories of Klein, Fairbairn, Edith Jacobson and Margaret Mahler. Kernberg drew on Fairbairn's view of the mind as made of internalised relationships, split into separate units of ego and object. In Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory⁷ (1983), Greenberg and Mitchell sorted psychoanalytic theories by the place they give to relations with others, in what they called drive/structure and relational/structure models. They treated Fairbairn, with Klein, Winnicott and Guntrip, as a radical alternative to drive theory. For Mitchell, Fairbairn's object-seeking libido was a cornerstone of the relational model of relational psychoanalysis. In Relationality⁸ (2000) he traced relational thought through Hans Loewald, Fairbairn and John Bowlby, and built on Fairbairn's idea of a self composed of many internal self–other configurations. In Creative Readings⁹ (2012), Ogden devoted one of his close readings of seminal analytic papers to the question of why Fairbairn is still worth reading.

Fairbairn's departures from Freud also drew criticism. Besides Klein's objections to his treatment of instinct and of the death instinct, accounts of his career record that colleagues criticised his model because it contradicted basic Freudian principles.

Fairbairn's papers from 1927 to 1951 are collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality¹ (1952), published in the United States as An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality (1954). Its core is a sequence of papers: Schizoid Factors in the Personality (1940); A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses³ (1941); The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects (with Special Reference to the 'War Neuroses')² (1943); Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships⁴ (1944); and Object-Relationships and Dynamic Structure (1946). The volume closes with a synopsis of the development of his views, written in 1951. His other papers, clinical, theoretical and applied, were gathered after his death in the two volumes of From Instinct to Self (1994), edited by David E. Scharff and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles.