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Dear Sir,
Whilst I welcome, and am in agreement with, most that Birtles and Scharff say in their recent paper on Fairbairn (IJPA, 78: 1085-1103), and believe that their book From Instinct to Self is an invaluable resource for all psychoanalytic scholars and theorists, I do think that their suggestion for modifying Fairbairn's model is open to (Fairbairnian) criticism.
I believe that Fairbairn's model is still relevant, if under-explored, and that it lends itself to a wide variety of potential applications. In my view, if it does need to be amended, it is in the direction of clarifying the dynamics of the model. The modifications suggested by Scharff and Birtles do not appear to come from this quarter, though I will argue that they do