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Jeremy Hazell's invaluable collection allows us to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of Guntrip's work and to trace the development of his thought over nearly three decades.
The book is arranged in four chronological sections: I. 1952-1958 The Fairbairn Period of ‘Broadly Oedipal’ Analysis, II. 1960-1962 The Schizoid Compromise: The Need and Fear of Regression, III. 1962-1969 The Winnicott Period: Regression and Regrowth, and IV. 1971-1978 ‘Living’: The Post-Winnicott Period.
I wish to focus particularly on one paper which seems most central and crucial. In ‘Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott (How Complete a Result Does PsychoAnalytic Therapy Achieve?)’, we see in a moving and significant way the connection between Guntrip's personal psychopathology and the basic principles of his theory. As he says himself: ‘The idea that we could think out a theory of the structure and functioning of the personality without its having any relation to the structure and functioning of our own personality, should be a self-evident impossibility’ (p. 368).
It was in 1949 that Guntrip decided to go into analysis with Fairbairn. He already accepted Fairbairn's rethinking of psychodynamic theory, the change from Freud's emphasis on instinct to the priority of object relations, together with his adoption of a theory of endopsychic structure containing internalised objects and potentially divided against itself. Already holding the view that psychoanalytic therapy depended not on theory but ultimately on a ‘truly understanding human relationship’ (p. 352), he felt that no intellectual disagreement would interfere with the analysis.
After three or four years Guntrip began to feel that Fairbairn, in spite of his original, logical approach, was concentrating too much in a classical way on the Oedipal level and on Guntrip's relationship with his mother as a bad object after the death of an infant brother. Guntrip felt that these phenomena were acting as a defence against a far deeper schizoid p