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.