Fairbairn's Journey into the Interior By John D. Sutherland London:  Free Association Books.

This book, written by John Sutherland, a ‘pupil, colleague and friend’ of Ronald Fairbairn, is an informative and fascinating psychobiography of Fairbairn. It takes the reader on two, linked, journeys into the interior of the human mind. One charts very carefully the development of Fairbairn's theoretical contribution, tracing the evolution of themes through the chronological study of his published papers. Sutherland portrays very clearly the main thesis of Fairbairn's theoretical developments in psychoanalytic thinking: that at the core of the personality, and that at the base of all psychopathology lies a split in the ego, a psychic rupture, of what was to begin with a unitary ego. This split in the self finds its genesis in ‘an innate rejection of what brought pain and thus had to be avoided’, and was due, in Fairbairn's view, to early maternal and environmental failure. Since frustration of oral and dependency needs is inevitable, this split in the ego is at the core of everyone's personality. For Fairbairn, the development of the internal world, and the conflict between love and hate, are primarily related to the quality of early environmental provision. In this way he came to the central tenet of his theory: that libido is essentially object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking.

The other inner world the book explores is that of Fairbairn himself. Sutherland drawn on biographical detail, Fairbairn's self-analytic notes, and his personal knowledge of the man, to give a detailed reconstruction of Fairbairn's inner world. The central chapters of the book are a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of the interplay between Fairbairn's inner world and his major theoretical constructs.

Sutherland carefully shows why and where Fairbairn departs from classical Freudian thinking, and also the impact of Mrs Klein's paper on him, and on the evolution of his ideas.

Overall, the book is an informative and scholarly work concerning itself both with Fairbairn's life and with the