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Fairbairn has made a sincere and bold attempt to revise psycho-analytic metapsychology in the light of his own clinical experience and through the private thinking that he has done while applying himself to the therapeutic task. The reader will be able to enrich himself by sharing the gradual evolution of a personal theory which is clearly presented by the method of a chronological order in the arrangement of the papers. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Fairbairn's theory, there is very much to be gained from a study of his way of looking at things.
A reviewer is in a less fortunate position than an ordinary reader, since Fairbairn makes a definite claim, and it must be this claim that gets the appraisal and the criticism. The claim is that Fairbairn's theory supplants that of Freud. If Fairbairn is right, then we teach Fairbairn and not Freud to our students. If one could escape from this claim one could enjoy the writings of an analyst who challenges everything, and who puts clinical evidence before accepted theory, and who is no worshipper at a shrine. But the claim is there. Incidentallly, Fairbairn writes as if there were practically no other psycho-analytic theoreticians except Freud, Abraham, and Klein, so that a review to be complete should include the quotations from other authors that Fairbairn seems to have left out of count. This will not, however, be attempted.
The first paper, 'Schizoid Factors in the Personality (1940), ' is perhaps the most stimulating and rewarding contribution in the whole book. Here Fairbairn suggests that the understanding of schizoid states, processes, and syndromes, and nothing else, can yield the deepest understanding of the origins and the true basis of human personality. The term 'schizoid' naturally undergoes a vast enlargement in his hands, and he is aware that it covers almost every facet of human living if looked at in the way that he suggests. And that is how it should be, according to the author, because (