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In this volume, Dr. Fairbairn presents a collection of various contributions published during twenty-four years. Some are already familiar to the reader of psychoanalytic literature. A few are published
for the first time. They are now arranged in serial form, to illustrate the gradual development of a line of thought that led the author to attempt to replace the 'outmoded impulse psychology', which Freud 'had never seen fit to abandon', by a psychology of object relationship.
Dr. Fairbairn's work is patently of Kleinian lineage. 'The ground has already been prepared for such a development of thought by the work of Melanie Klein, and indeed it is only in the light of her conception of internalized objects that a study of object relationships can be expected to yield any significant results for psychopathology' (p. 60). Unlike other followers of the Kleinian school of thought, who maintain that the Kleinian metapsychology is not a deviation but an advanced, logical development of freudian theory, Dr. Fairbairn is forthright in pointing out ambiguities and inconsistencies in Kleinian theory, which he feels are due to a residual and unnecessary clinging to some aspects of the outdated freudian theory, and which prevent Mrs. Klein from pushing her views to their logical conclusion. He rightly notes, for example, that 'the conception of internalized objects has been developed without any significant modification of a libido theory, with which there is no small reason to think that it is incompatible' (p. 83), and again, 'Mrs. Klein has, of course, come to regard the Oedipus situation as originating at a very much earlier stage than was formerly supposed. Her resolution of the difficulty must accordingly be interpreted as having been achieved at the expense of the "phase" theory' (pp. 92-93). Certainly, the placing of the Oedipus situation at five to six months does imply the sacrifice of the libido theory with its corollaries.
Dr. Fairbairn proceeds to take over