Response

Dear Sir,

We share Graham Clarke's interest in preserving the integrity of Fairbairn's model, and at the same time, in promoting it's evolution. So we welcome his thoughtful critique, which gives us an opportunity to clarify our ideas about extending Fairbairn's model.

We believe our modifications are not only consistent with the dynamic core of Fairbairn's contribution, but that they enhance the range of his model, answer some of the linguistic ambiguity of his argument, and provide a model for the meaning of synthesis and integration which he thought was at the heart of maturation and psychoanalytic growth.

Fairbairn's concept of the libidinal ego is complex. He found Freud's concept of libido problematic, as he did Freud's concept of the superego in its role as the agent of repression (Fairbairn, 1929a, b, 1930). Fairbairn used the term libidinal ego to denote a repressed area of the self tied painfully to an unsatisfying, and thus frustrating and over-stimulating, internal object. The outcome of the infant's unsatisfactory experience is the split off libidinal ego which, precisely because it is split off, is limited and so operates solely in a satisfaction-seeking mode. It is implicit in Fairbairn's model of endopsychic structure that the libidinal ego incorporates an inalienable part of the self, motivated by the need for self-affirming relationships throughout life. However Fairbairn never fully delineated this constellation. Our model is, perhaps more than anything, an attempt to address this problem.

Clarke argues against our revision of Fairbairn in three areas: first, he states that secondary repression, which Fairbairn described as the anti-libidinal ego's attack on the libidinal ego and object, was Fairbairn's equivalent of Freud's notion of repression. We do not completely agree: Fairbairn argued that the central ego itself is the agent of primary repression, not the superego as Freud had said. The central ego acts to split and repress libidinal an