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Dr Sutherland was first Fairbairn's pupil, then his analysand, and later his colleague and friend. His obvious respect and affection for his subject are apparent.
Sutherland elaborates the connection between Fairbairn's troubled inner life and his theory. He centres his account on Fairbairn's relationships with his parents. But he also sets Fairbairn's life in its cultural context; Scotland with its tensions as the legacy of enlightened thinking of individuals such as Hume constrained by the moralistic climate of Calvinism with its glorification of work and suspicion of joy and sexuality. These values influenced Fairbairn's parents and through them Fairbairn himself.
Sutherland's respect for his colleague does not lead to idealisation. He gives a portrayal of a troubled man trying to make sense of his own neurosis. He makes use of Fairbairn's private self-analytic notes to illustrate this struggle. Sutherland also emphasises the institutional factors that influenced Fairbairn's professional development and possible professional advancement. This emphasises Fairbairn's thesis that the need for acceptance and relatedness does not only constrain the development of a separate differentiated self in the first three years of life. It is an ongoing hazard.
Fairbairn was trying to comprehend and integrate his clinical experience in relative isolation in the then psychoanalytic desert of Edinburgh. A desert that Dr Sutherland and other colleagues have done much to alter with the establishment of the Scottish Institute of Human Relations. Fairbairn's struggle for intellectual and personal