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Despite the prominence of object relations theory in current psychoanalytic writing and practice, the seminal work of Ronald Fairbairn in this area has, until recently, received little acknowledgment. By collecting in these two volumes some of his hitherto scattered papers, his daughter, Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles, and her coeditor David Scharff have taken an important step toward according Fairbairn the recognition he richly deserves.
Fairbairn's remarkable intellect and his independent spirit led him first to critically appraise and then to challenge the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory. Life in Edinburgh isolated him from the British psychoanalytic community and afforded him little support for his in-depth explorations of the psyche. Undeterred by the hostility toward psychoanalysis from some of his senior academic colleagues, Fairbairn applied himself to a rigorous examination of the basic underpinnings of Freudian metapsychology. Drawing on his clinical experience, he challenged both the dual-instinct theory and the theory of psychosexual development and presented a convincing argument for the primacy of object seeking rather than pleasure seeking as a motivator of human behavior. He concluded that it was this fundamental search for relationships that organized psychic structure and explained its developmental vicissitudes. He contended that the aims attributed by Freud to the libido were really defensive techniques adopted by the self to deal with its depriving objects.