Chapter 4 Why Read Fairbairn?

I have found that Fairbairn develops a model of the mind that incorporates into its very structure a conceptualization of early psychic development that is not found in the writing of any other major twentieth-century analytic theorist. Fairbairn replaces Freud’s (1923) structural model/metaphor of the mind with a model/metaphor in which the mind is conceived of as an “inner world” (Fairbairn, 1943b, p. 67) in which split-off and repressed parts of the self enter into stable, yet potentially alterable, object relationships with one another. The “cast of characters” (that is, sub-organizations of the personality) constituting Fairbairn’s internal object world is larger than the triumvirate of Freud’s structural model and provides what I find to be a richer set of metaphors with which to understand (1) certain types of human dilemmas, particularly those based on the fear that one’s love is destructive; and (2) the central role played by feelings of resentment, contempt, disillusionment and addictive “love” in structuring the unconscious mind.

To my mind, Fairbairn’s theory of internal object relations constitutes one of the most important contributions to the development of analytic theory in its first century. Yet, judging from the scarcity of references to his work in the analytic literature, particularly in North American and Latin American writing, his theoretical ideas (for example, ideas that he introduced in his 1940, 1941, 1943b and 1944 papers) and his clinical thinking (which he presented in his 1956 and 1958 papers) have attracted far less interest and study than have other major twentieth-century analytic theorists such as Klein, Winnicott and Bion. In part this is due to the fact that Fairbairn worked in isolation in Edinburgh. He had little opportunity for personal involvement or intellectual exchange with colleagues at the Institute of

Psychoanalysis in London whose members, in his era, included Balint, Bion, Anna Freud, Heimann, Klein, Milner, Rosenfe