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W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, an intellectual founder of the British object-relations school, is today considered one of the most original theoreticians in psychoanalytic history, but his work remains relatively unknown in the United States, at least compared to that of his equally innovative contemporaries, Klein and Winnicott. Although Fairbairn (1952) is renowned for his dictum that “libido is not primarily pleasure-seeking, but object-seeking” (p. 137), his radical rejection of classical drive theory constitutes the most likely explanation for the continuing difficulties that psychoanalytic writers have had in coming to terms with his ideas, even in a day in which orthodox consensus in this regard has splintered.
In their edited volume, Fairbairn and the Origins of Object Relations, James Grotstein and the late Donald Rinsley, who died shortly after he and his coeditor had begun their work together, attempt to remedy this historical neglect of Fairbairn by presenting papers by leading commentators on his work. Any book that contains contributions not only by Grotstein and by Rinsley but also by Otto Kernberg, Stephen Mitchell, Arnold Modell, Thomas Ogden, and John Sutherland, among others, is surely one that demands attention. Nevertheless, this collection is ultimately disappointing. Because my bias is to regard psychoanalysis as a theory that needs confirmation by empirical research, I find problematic this volume's emphasis on metapsychological debate