Is Fairbairn Still at Large?

Review Essay of Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition, edited by Graham S. Clarke & David E. Scharff. London: Karnac Books, 2014. 544 pp.

William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn (1889–1964) was a most unusual psychoanalyst. Just like many others in his generation, he did not have a psychoanalytic training as we conceive it today. Having originally studied theology, philosophy, and Hellenism, he then participated in World War I. When he returned, he began a new career, studying medicine first and then psychiatry. This led him to develop an interest in psychoanalysis and enter a personal psychoanalytic treatment with Ernest Henry Connell, an Australian psychoanalyst who had been analyzed by Ernest Jones. In 1924, when he graduated as a psychiatrist, he began his clinical practice, wrote his first psychoanalytic paper in 1927, and attended the Oxford Psychoanalytical Congress in 1929 (Fairbairn, 1929b/1994). In 1931, he was elected as an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and in 1939 he became a full member. (Burton, 2016; Sutherland, 1965).

Being Scottish and living in Edinburgh, he was for many years the only psychoanalyst in town. The fact that he lived over 400 miles from London kept him in a situation of relative isolation and a scanty interchange with his colleagues surely contributed to the independence and originality of his thought (Jones, 1952). From 1928 through 1930, he did a painstaking

study of Freud's work, which led him gradually to differ from some fundamental points of his theories. During the 1940s, he wrote a series of revolutionary articles in which he formulated his novel ideas; these were published in his now classic book Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (Fairbairn, 1952).

Fairbairn's main contribution, which was to become the theoretical foundation of the British Independent Group's Object Relations Theory, was his concept that the main motivation of human experience, thought, and behavior is the search for the objec