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This volume contains 13 papers, plus an interview with Otto Kernberg, paying tribute to the importance and originality of Fairbairn's contributions at the time when they were made and exploring their implications for psychoanalysis today. The subtitle of the volume reflects an assumption that Fairbairn's ideas have gone, in too unexamined a way, from being largely ignored Then to being taken for granted Now, that is, now that they harmonize so well with contemporary relational views. While these papers are hard to generalize about as a group because of the variety of content and approach, their contributors, in addition to their strong allegiance to Fairbairn and their generally marked commitment to relational perspectives, agree that conceptualizing self and other are of equal importance. As a group they tend to accept, sometimes with modifications, Fairbairn's ideas about endopsychic structure. They concur about making room for the internalization of good objects—as Fairbairn did not. What they also share, to various degrees and with certain exceptions, is a lingering though attenuated reliance on drive theory and ego psychology, even though Fairbairn tried to set his course in a different direction.
Among the exceptions are noteworthy contributions by Davies, Mitchell, and Scharff. Seizing upon the fact that in 1929 Fairbairn devoted his doctoral thesis to a discussion of differences between dissociation and repression, Jody Messler Davies reveals that