Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality

336 Pages·1994·0.8 MB·English

by  W. Fairbairn

Psychoanalytic Studies
of the Personality
Since publication of this volume in 1952, W. R. D. Fairbairn’s focus on object
relations has re-oriented psychoanalysis by placing the child’s need for
relationships at the centre of development. His object relations theory elaborated
a model of psychic structure built upon the internalization and modification of
experience with parents and other people of central importance to the child, and
showed how the self or ego handles the dissatisfactions inevitable in all
relationships through internalization of the object, followed by ego splitting
and repression of painful internal object relations.
Fairbairn’s work has been the starting point for Bowlby’s work on attachment,
Guntrip and Sutherland’s writing on the self, Dicks’ contribution to understanding
marriage, Kernberg’s treatment of severe personality disorders, and Mitchell’s
relational theory. Fairbairn’s ideas have become central to psychoanalysis; they
often pass for truisms, making it hard to remember a time when the individual’s
need for relationships was not seen as the central focus of development and of
therapy.
This classic collection of papers, available for the first time in paperback,
has a new introduction by David E. Scharff and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles which
traces the origins of Fairbairn’s thought and outlines its modern relevance,
setting Fairbairn’s work in a context in which it can be newly appreciated.
David E. Scharff, MD is the Director of the Center for the Study of Object
Relations, Washington, D.C. and former Director of the Washington School of
Psychiatry. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services
University of the Health Sciences and at Georgetown University Medical School
and a Teaching Analyst in the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Ellinor
Fairbairn Birtles, the daughter of the late W. R. D. Fairbairn, is Director of
SITA Technology Ltd.
PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES
OF THE PERSONALITY
With a new introduction by David E. Scharff, MD and
Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles
W. R. D. FAIRBAIRN
London and New York
First published 1952
by Tavistock Publications Limited
in collaboration with
Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited
First published in paperback in 1994
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1952 W.R.D. Fairbairn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-415-05174-6 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-10737-7 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-12944-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17845-9 (Glassbook Format)
Preface
R. FAIRBAIRN’S position in the field of psycho-analysis is a special one and
one of great interest. Living hundreds of miles from his nearest colleagues,
Dwhom he seldom meets, has great advantages, and also some disadvantages.
The main advantage is that, being subject to no distraction or interference, he has been
able to concentrate entirely on his own ideas as they develop from his daily working
experience. This is a situation that conduces to originality, and Dr. Fairbairn’s originality
is indisputable. On the other hand, it requires very special powers of self-criticism to
dispense with the value of discussion with co-workers, who in the nature of things
must be able to point out considerations overlooked by a lonely worker or to modify
the risk of any one-sided train of thought. It is not for me to forestall the judgement
that will be passed on the contents of the book, but I may be allowed to express the
firm opinion that it will surely prove extremely stimulating to thought.
If it were possible to condense Dr. Fairbairn’s new ideas into one sentence, it might
run somewhat as follows. Instead of starting, as Freud did, from stimulation of the
nervous system proceeding from excitation of various erotogenous zones and internal
tension arising from gonadic activity, Dr. Fairbairn starts at the centre of the personality,
the ego, and depicts its strivings and difficulties in its endeavour to reach an object
where it may find support. Dr. Fairbairn has elaborated this theme in the pages that
follow, and he has worked out its implications both biologically in regard to the
problems of instinct and psychologically in the baffling interchange of external and
internal objects. All this constitutes a fresh approach in psycho-analysis which should
lead to much fruitful discussion.
ERNEST JONES
v
Contents
PREFACE BY ERNEST JONES page v

INTRODUCTION ix

PART ONE
An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality

I. SCHIZOID FACTORS IN THE PERSONALITY (1940) 3
II. A REVISED PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE PSYCHOSES
AND PSYCHONEUROSES (1941) 28
III. THE REPRESSION AND THE RETURN OF BAD OBJECTS
(WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ‘WAR NEUROSES’)
(1943) 59
IV. ENDOPSYCHIC STRUCTURE CONSIDERED IN TERMS OF
OBJECT-RELATIONSHIPS (1944) 82
V. OBJECT-RELATIONSHIPS AND DYNAMIC STRUCTURE
(1946) 137
VI. STEPS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN OBJECT-RELATIONS
THEORY OF THE PERSONALITY (1949) 152
VII. A SYNOPSIS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AUTHOR’S
VIEWS REGARDING THE STRUCTURE OF THE
PERSONALITY (1951) 162
vii
Contents
PART TWO
Clinical Papers
I. NOTES ON THE RELIGIOUS PHANTASIES OF A FEMALE
PATIENT (1927) 183
II. FEATURES IN THE ANALYSIS OF A PATIENT WITH A
PHYSICAL GENITAL ABNORMALITY (1931) 197
III. THE EFFECT OF A KING’S DEATH UPON PATIENTS UNDERGOING
ANALYSIS (1936) 223

PART THREE
Miscellaneous Papers
I. THE SOCIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF COMMUNISM
CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
(1935) 233
II. PSYCHOLOGY AS A PRESCRIBED AND AS A PROSCRIBED
SUBJECT (1939) 247
III. THE WAR NEUROSES—THEIR NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE
(1943) 256
IV. THE TREATMENT AND REHABILITATION OF SEXUAL
OFENDERS (1946) 289
LIST OF WORKS 297
INDEX 298
viii
Introduction
DAVID E. SCHARFF, MD AND ELLINOR FAIRBAIRN BIRTLES
T is now fifty years since the publication of the paper ‘Endopsychic Structure
Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships’, which brought Fairbairn’s fully
Ideveloped object-relations theory of the personality to fruition. That paper
introduced the essential elements of Fairbairn’s contribution, although modifications,
illustrations and applications were to follow.
The first four papers of this book constitute the heart of his original contribution.
Reading the papers Fairbairn wrote before them, it is not difficult to see how the
careful study of Freud’s major contributions, the close attention to the processes of
repression and dissociation, and the dedication to logical thought guided Fairbairn in
the thirteen years of his early psychoanalytic writing. Even there, alongside the
careful attention to Freud evident from the first of Fairbairn’s writings, is an assumption
which is not specifically articulated, but which comes to the fore over time: that the
meaning of life-events is intensely personal and idiosyncratic – understandable only in
terms of the life-course and context of each individual. From the beginning Fairbairn
held that the family formed the context for each person’s growth. More than any early
writer, except perhaps for Freud himself, Fairbairn’s clinical attention centres not in
the unfolding of a pre-set structure, but on the way the family experience informs the
meaning of individual narrative in therapy. We can see this clearly in two early papers
printed in this volume, the paper on the analysis of a patient with a genital abnormality
(1931), and the briefer illustration of the idiosyncratic meaning to three analytic
patients of the meaning of a national event, the death of King George V (1936). We see
it more clearly spelled out in the paper on the nature of war neuroses (1943). These
ix