Thinking Through Fairbairn

Exploring the Object Relations Model of Mind

Graham S. Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429840708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Thinking through Fairbairn offers parallel perspectives on Fairbairn's work. It explores an extended interpretation of his 'psychology of dynamic structure' and applies that model to a number of different areas. Fairbairn's Scottish origins are explored through his relationship with the work of Ian Suttie and Edward Glover. A new extended object relations model of phantasy and inner reality that reflects Fairbairn's approach as represented by his contribution to the Controversial Discussions is also developed. In cooperation with Paul Finnegan, this version of Fairbairn's model is applied to an understanding of multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. This model is combined with Fairbairn's theory of art to provide an understanding of some 'puzzle' films based in trauma and dissociation. Fairbairn's theory is presented here as a synthesis of classical and relational approaches, and his appropriation by relational theorists as a precursor to exclusively relational approaches challenged.

PART I

SCOTTISH CONTEMPORARIES

CHAPTER ONE

Suttie’s influence on Fairbairn’s object relations theory

Introduction

Within Fairbairn scholarship there is a consensus that Fairbairn made a creative breakthrough in the early 1940s when his psychology of dynamic structure—a consistent object relations approach to psychoanalytic theory—was developed in a number of papers (1940, 1941, 1943a, 1944). However, explanatory accounts of this “creative step” (Sutherland, 1989) are less clear and on this matter there is no general consensus.

The relationship between the work of Fairbairn and that of his fellow Scot, Ian D. Suttie, is generally recognised to be significant where Suttie is regarded as having “anticipated” (Grotstein 1998; Guntrip 1971; Harrow 1998; Kirkwood 2005; Robbins 1994) and influenced Fairbairn. However, there is little objective evidence for this, since nowhere in his work does Fairbairn mention Suttie, or his only book The origins of Love and hate (OLH), which was first published in 1935. This might have been thought remarkable in itself, given these two men’s Scottish origins and the nature of their theories but, perhaps more importantly, there is no mention of the relationship between Suttie and Fairbairn in Pereira and Scharff’s Fairbairn and Relational Theory (1989) or in Birtles and Scharff’s invaluable two volume From instinct to Self (1994). Nor is there any mention of Suttie in either of two books that deal exclusively with the Independents within the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPS)—Gregory Kohon’s The British School of Psychoanalysis: The independent Tradition (1986), and Eric Rayner’s The independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (1991). This may be accurate in the sense that Suttie, a psychiatrist, was not a member of the BPS but it is nevertheless surprising given the influence he has been said to have on many of the Independents—Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bowlby, and others (see below).

I believe I have found a significant clue as to Suttie’s influence on Fairbairn’s object relations theory in Fairbairn’s heavily underlined copy of a 1939 edition of Suttie’s book.

While researching aspects of Fairbairn’s theory I approached the University of Edinburgh Library (UEL) concerning an archive of Fairbairn’s papers. In the course of this enquiry I asked about Fairbairn’s library, which I had been told by Fairbairn’s daughter, Ellinor (personal communication), was also held in Scotland. Ann Henderson, a librarian at UEL found that there was a collection of books, believed to be Fairbairn’s library, held by UEL and I was directed to the Special Collections where Joseph Marshall and Tricia Boyd were very helpful in helping me locate the, at that time, uncatalogued, collection of books and provided access to them on a visit I made to Edinburgh in October 2009. According to the printed plate inside the front cover of each of these approximately two hundred and eighty books, they were from the library of W. R. D. Fairbairn “A Pioneer of Psychoanalysis” and had been donated by his son, the late Nicholas Fairbairn M.P. (1933–1995).

I suggest that it was Fairbairn’s study of this copy of Suttie’s book that helped to prompt the “creative step” that led to Fairbairn’s ground-breaking papers of the 1940s. When one compares the underlined parts of Suttie’s text with Fairbairn’s development of his psychology of dynamic structure the influence is obvious, as I illustrate below. However, to be clear, this is only one root of Fairbairn’s thinking and does not account for the structural aspects of his mature theory, which Fairbairn had been developing since the late 1920s (1927, 1931).

Many passages in Suttie’s book are underlined in the characteristic way that Fairbairn marked the books he studied. There are several other books in the collection underlined in exactly the same way. In Suttie’s book the underlinings include parts of (a) J. A. Hadfield’s introduction, (b) the actual introduction and (c) the first four chapters of the book plus (d) two other later sections. These appear to be quite deliberate (see below for an example) and concern ideas that provide an armature for Fairbairn’s developed object relations theory. I think that Fairbairn’s close study of this book was instrumental in his making the “creative step” in his papers of the 1940s. The existence of this link back through the Independent grouping of the BPS to Suttie and before him to Rank and Ferenczi (1925) and back to the object relations based work of Freud provides an alternative “tradition” of object relations thinking to that traced back through Klein. Padel (1985, 1991) noted that one root of object relations thinking can be found in Freud’s paper on narcissism, where the infant is described as internalising the nursing couple and subsequently identifying with one or other side of that relationship in making a choice of object. This, combined with the fact that both Klein and Fairbairn take the super-ego, of Freud’s structural theory, to be the exemplar of an internal object, suggests that the full description of the development of object relations thinking goes back at least as far as Freud himself, whose Group Psychology is regarded by Padel (1985) as a good example of object relations thinking—in particular, in the case of group formation, where “a number of individuals … have put one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (Padel, 1985 quoting Freud). Ogden (2002) also argues that Freud was developing an object relations approach in his paper on the origins of object relations thinking (Mourning and Melancholia), which he explicitly associates with Fairbairn.

A brief example

The following (complete) paragraph from page three of Suttie’s book shows a typical marking that Fairbairn makes to Suttie’s text. Fairbairn’s underlinings are reproduced.

When I began my studies of social behaviour twenty years ago, however, I never imagined that I would come to attempt to put the conception of altruistic (non-appetitive) love on a scientific footing. Rejecting the “ad hoc” and therefore sterile hypothesis of a “herd instinct” both on biological and methodological grounds, (A) I was nevertheless early compelled to recognise that the psychoses are essentially disorders of the social disposition; (B) and that all our theories of the construction of the social group are seriously inadequate. (G) Five years ago, however, I realised that the infant differs more from our primitive ancestors than we adults do, in spite of Recapitulation Theories (C, D, E) and that this adaptation to infancy (as I called it) implies an innate disposition towards the social habit though not towards a “Herd Instinct”. (F) Nurture of the young and “the social habit” appeared to me associated with each other, and with the replacement of blind instinct by intelligence, in their actual distribution throughout the Animal Kingdom (G). (Suttie, 1935, p. 3)

Suttie and Fairbairn: an overview

Before proceeding to a detailed comparison of Fairbairn’s markings of Suttie’s text with Fairbairn’s mature theory I want to try to contextualise the relationship between Suttie and Fairbairn as it appears today.

Ian Dishart Suttie’s book The Origins of Love and Hate has been widely influential among the British Object Relations group (the Middle Group or Independents) and explicitly acknowledged as such by Winnicott and Bowlby. Commentators have drawn attention to the importance of Suttie’s work for this group (Akhtar, 1999; Beattie, 2003; Bowlby, 1960; Hoffman, 2004; Skolnick, 2006; Tolmacz, 2006; Wallerstein, 1988) and Bacal in particular:

I would like to begin this survey of object-relations theorists with Ian Suttie, who was a central figure in the early Tavistock group … and whose ideas significantly anticipated the work of Fairbairn, Guntrip, Balint and Winnicott … (Bacal, 1987, p. 82)

Rudnytsky (1992) also has a very clear view of Suttie’s, mostly unacknowledged, importance.

In assessing both the historical unfolding and the theoretical achievement of object relations thought, special mention must be made of Ian Suttie’s Origins of Love and Hate (1935). This book, largely neglected at the time of its publication, has increasingly been hailed as a classic and indeed contains the kernel of virtually every idea elaborated by subsequent analysts. (Rudnytsky, 1992, p. 294)

The importance of Suttie’s work is becoming recognised and discussed in a wider context where some of the most interesting work on British object relations thinking is taking place (Gerson 2004, 2009; Miller 2007, 2008a, 2008b) but unfortunately Suttie remains outside the psychoanalytic mainstream. For instance The origins of Love and hate is not among the books in the PEPWeb database, and where Suttie does appear in the journal papers in PEPWeb there is little substantive discussion of his work and his influence is stated briefly rather than argued in any depth.

While Fairbairn is regarded by synoptic reviewers of object relations thinking as the most thoroughgoing developer of that mode of thinking, it is significant that neither Mitchell and Greenberg (1983) nor Judith Hughes (1989) have any indexed references to Suttie, or any discussion of his work or influence. This lack of reference to Suttie is also true of Frank Summers’ object Relations Theories and Psychopathology (1994) and of Otto Kernberg’s object Relations and Clinical Psychoanalysis (1981) and Internal world and External Reality (1984). In the latter there is a full chapter on Fairbairn but no mention of Suttie.

Scharff and Birtles (1997) have argued for the widespread but generally unacknowledged influence that Fairbairn’s theory has had on psychoanalytic theory in the U.K. and the U.S.A. and Migone also makes the point that object relations theory has had a wide and generally unacknowledged influence.

But the developments of Self Psychology are not an isolated phenomenon. They belong to a wider transformation of contemporary psychoanalysis: the latter is increasingly influenced by the so called “object relation theory” [sic]. Today this is probably the most fashionable psychoanalytic school on both continents. Its principal characteristic is an emphasis on environment and on the development of early interpersonal relationships. This school in Great Britain was anticipated by the pioneering work of Suttie. Later it was developed by Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicott’s “middle group”. Then it was exported to the United States where it was “grafted” on to Ego Psychology and as such was spread by Kernberg and other authors who had been exposed to Kleinian theory. (Migone, 1994, p. 90)

Sutherland argues in his biography that Fairbairn’s Freudian views on aggression in 1938 (Sutherland, 1989, p. 58), which are in marked contrast to his views a few year later, are due to internecine struggles over metapsychology in Edinburgh, but it would seem simpler to conclude that, after studying Suttie, Fairbairn changed his mind and made some of Suttie’s approach his own. Sutherland did comment on Suttie’s book and Fairbairn’s relationship to it although this comment is not referenced in the index of his biography of Fairbairn.

Fairbairn’s views in some measure were anticipated by Suttie in his book The Origins of Love and Hate (1935). This book was known to him, and he thought it important. For Fairbairn, however, Suttie’s arguments were apparently couched too much as a general protest without the carefully assembled clinical data and structural theory required—a view that was s...