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While Fairbairn's writings were debated in Great Britain during his lifetime, they went virtually unnoticed in American psychoanalysis until Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) stimulated the American interest in Fairbairn's thought that is now gathering long-overdue momentum. Nonetheless, Fairbairn's work is still largely ignored by established psychoanalysis and is little taught in most APA-approved psychoanalytic institutes. The volume under review is a major step in the movement to recognize the originality and value of one of psychoanalysis' most historically underappreciated figures. James Grotstein and Donald Rinsley have put together a rich variety of commentaries on Fairbairn's work, most of which have been previously published, that addresses and even debates within the volume itself many of the issues raised by the work of this revolutionary theorist.
The issues given most emphasis in this volume are: (1) Fairbairn's shift to an object relations paradigm based on the concept of libido as object-seeking rather than pleasure seeking; (2) attachment to bad objects and resistance to giving them up in pathology and, especially by victims of abuse; (3) the “moral” defense; and, (4) the relationship between Fairbairn's theory and other theorists.
Most contributors see Fairbairn as the originator of a new movement within psychoanalysis that gives striving for interpersonal relatedness to be more fundamental than the pursuit of tension reduction. The papers by John Sutherland and Richard Rubens view Fairbairn as a revolutionary thinker who correctly saw the need for relationships with others as primary and more fundamental then tension discharge. Sutherland sees a “Copernican revolution” in Fairbairn's view of the mind as open and offers an explanation based on evolution as to why the need for others is primary. In fact, many of the authors point out, quite correctly, that subsequent infant