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Ronald Fairbairn's work has had a powerful influence on psychoanalytic thinking; an influence that, as the editors note, has been insufficiently acknowledged until recently. They are referring, of course, to the public recognition conferred by printed scientific debate. However, in this reviewer's experience, Fairbairn has always exerted a quiet influence, at least in the education of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical psychotherapists in Great Britain. The state of affairs described by the editors is currently being remedied; a number of scholarly and critical appreciations have recently been published within the wider context of a burgeoning interest in comparative studies of what is broadly referred to as the British object-relations school, for example, Greenberg & Mitchell (1983) and more recently Grotstein & Rinsley (1994), together with Sutherland's biographical study Fairbairn's Journey into the Interior (1989). My impression is that the editors’ contention of neglect is overstated inasmuch as Fairbairn's informal influence may have been greater than they suppose: this is the ‘quiet’ aspect referred to earlier. For example, Eric Rayner (personal communication) described how many British analysts, especially Independents, mentioned Fairbairn surprisingly frequently when asked to name an early influence.
Nevertheless, it is misleading to maintain, as the editors do in their Introduction to Volume I, that his work has become ‘an accepted core of the thinking of the Independent Group of British Analysts’. In this reviewer's opinion, there is no accepted core in the editors’ theoretical sense: the core of the Independent group is a never-ending struggle to maintain respect for diversity amongst what is judged to be truly psychoanalytical.
Critical evaluations of Fairbairn are available in the aforementioned texts and elsewhere. The intention in these two volumes is to collate the unpublished and uncollected papers so that clinicians and scholars have ready access.