Editor's Note: An Object Relations Theory of Prejudice

The following two papers, by Thomas Oberlechner and Ron Aviram respectively, introduce the ideas of Ronald Fairbairn. Aviram applies certain of Fairbairn's ideas to a study of prejudice, arguing that prejudice in some cases might be better explained by looking at character pathology rooted in developmental failures than by looking at social conditions. He draws interesting parallels between Fairbairn's work and empirical work on prejudice from social psychology. We are publishing Oberlechner's paper to give an audience unfamiliar with Fairbairn a more detailed introduction to his views on development, on a human nature motivated not by pleasure-seeking but by object seeking, on an unconscious that arises from relational failures, and on the nature of an ego multiply split in relation to its objects. As Oberlechner writes, paranoia, hysteria, obsessive compulsion, considered to be character types in classical theories, are for Fairbairn all defenses against a more basic schizoid condition. While Oberlechner's paper does not itself suggest how one might draw on Fairbairn's theory to address social issues, his introduction raises a possible challenge to Aviram's assumption that a Fairbairnian view of prejudice roots prejudice in individual rather than social pathology. As Oberlechner suggests at the end of his paper, where he considers the clinical implications of Fairbairn's theory, Fairbairn's “understanding of schizoid splitting and withdrawal mechanisms has helped define the narcissistic and borderline personality disorder.” Many psychoanalytic social critics have examined the connections between the demands of contemporary capitalism and the production and prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder (Lasch, Kovel, Livesay, Sloan, to name a few). Fairbairn's analysis of schizoid phenomena captures a complexity of narcissistic disorders that Kohut's work does not. Further, and with regard specifically to the understanding of prejudice, what Fairbairn describes c