You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
20th July 1954.
Dear Mr. Guntrip,
You will hardly believe it, but it is only now that I have been able to get down to reading your letter which you kindly wrote after reading my paper on Regression.1 I find the points that you made extremely interesting and also I am trying to profit by your interest in relating new ideas to the work of Fairbairn.
There seems to be just one thing that you have taken from Fair-bairn which I think is unnecessary, and that is the tendency to think of his work as opposed to that of Freud. You remember that in his book he makes a very definite point of supplanting Freud's theories and in my opinion he spoils a very good book by this, which is quite unnecessary. From my point of view any theories that I may have which are original are only valuable as a growth of ordinary Freudian psycho-analytic theory. My paper on Regression would make no sense at all if planted on a world that had not been prepared for it by Freud. In any paper I have written I simply take for granted that people know their Freud and are familiar with the developing theory which had to be started off somewhere. Freud could easily have gone straight through intuitively to fundamental truths but that was not what he wanted to do. He wanted to set aside all sorts of tempting intuitions (which however turned up in the footnotes and odd remarks here and there) and he wanted to begin a new science, although this meant concentrating on the bit of work that was just under his nose at the time.
I would very much like to know that you feel in this way about Freud's work to which we all owe everything if we are doing psycho-therapy. I also feel that Fairbairn must really agree with all this, only he happens to take the line that he is knocking Freud over and putting up something in his place.