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.