From Instinct to Self: Selected Papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn. Vol. 1: Clinical and Theoretical Papers. Vol. 2: Applications and Early Contributions, edited by D. Scharff and E. Birtles, Jason Aronson, 1994.

These two volumes, set in a print size that is hard indeed on the aging reader, are a most valuable contribution to the psychoanalytic library. The editors have splendidly accomplished the task of presenting Fairbairn's theory and practice in greater depth than was available before in the previously published volume of his papers, Psycho-Analytic Studies of the Personality (London: ), from which most of my generation learned about Fairbairn's thought. Every psychoanalyst will benefit from reading the papers in these two new volumes, as they bring up for consideration every aspect of our theories and practice including those long taken for granted, such as the use of the couch, and so on.

I will make no effort in this review to summarize Fairbairn's psychoanalytic theories and assume the reader is at least generally familiar with them (for details and references, see my A Dictionary for Psychotherapists, , pp. 317-320). Suffice it to say that his theories are not at all compatible with those of Freud, and, like the theories of Kohut, Klein, and others, they stand or fall on the clinicians' willingness to accept them, use them, and substitute them in his or her thinking for those of Freud. What makes Fairbairn's work so important is that it surely has a ring of truth when considering our clinical experience in the light of it, and is one of the first attempts to emphasize the importance of the real relationship between the analyst and patient in the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis. In so doing, it switches our conception of psychoanalysis away from the 19th-century scientific orientation of Freud to the 20th-century emphasis on hermeneutics and communication. One of the unanticipated dividends of the study of these volumes is to recognize how closely Fairbairn anticipated Kohut's view.

Having made these highly favorable comments, it is time for some minor complaints. In the first place, the editors have produced a preface and introductions to the sections that tend