Fairbairn, Then and Now

Neil J. Skolnick, David E. Scharff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134897339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

W. R. D. Fairbairn was both a precursor and an architect of revolutionary change in psychoanalysis. Through a handful of tightly reasoned papers written in the 1940s and 1950s, Fairbairn emerged as an incisive, albeit relatively obscure, voice in the wilderness, at considerable remove from mainstream Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. But in the 1970s Harry Guntrip made Fairbairn's thinking more accessible to a wide readership, and Fairbairn's object relations theory, with its innovative theoretical and clinical concepts, was at the center of the turn toward relational thinking that swept psychoanalysis in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fairbairn, Then and Now is a landmark volume, because a thorough grasp of Fairbairn's contribution is crucial to any understanding of what is taking place within psychoanalysis today. And Fairbairn's work remains a treasure trove of rich insights into the problems and issues in theory and clinical practice with which analysts and therapists are struggling today.

This is a particularly propitious time for renewed focus on Fairbairn's contribution. A wealth of previously unpublished material has recently emerged, and the implications of Fairbairn's ideas for current developments in trauma, dissociation, infant research, self theory, field theory, and couple and family therapy are becoming increasingly clear. The conference that stimulated the contributions to this volume by internationally eminent Fairbairn clinicians and scholars was a historically important event, and Fairbairn, Then and Now makes the intellectual ferment generated by this event available to all interested readers.

Part 1

Historical Connections

1

The Scottish Connection—Suttie-Fairbairn-Sutherland

A Quiet Revolution

J. Alan Harrow

E. M. Forster (1973) said, “Only connect … only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height” (pp. 183–184).

Connections, acknowledged or otherwise, in general are a crucial part of theory building and in particular have played an important role in developing and establishing a line of thought that is essentially Scottish in the work of Suttie, Fairbairn, and Sutherland. Just why this mold-breaking psychoanalytic perspective reflected in the theories of this trio of Scotsmen should have come about at all is not absolutely clear. Drummond Hunter (1995) offers an interesting philosophical clue to why the psychoanalytical theoretical development described here came about in Scotland. He says, “In the broadest sense (and its broad, philosophical background should never be forgotten) psychoanalysis was a child of the 18th century enlightenment and, in particular, perhaps of Schiller’s (1982) great project, which was to realize the human in humanity” (p. 171). He continues, “It was no accident that the biographer of Schiller, Thomas Carlyle, who had introduced German philosophy and literature to Britain, may well have been the first British writer and thinker to rediscover the central (but now significantly enhanced) role of ‘the self.’” This happened in a moment of insight when, in 1821, after three weeks of sleepless nights, he was walking down Leith Walk in Edinburgh. Carlyle (1897) describes the experience:

To me the universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of volition, even of hostility; it was one huge, dead immeasurable steam engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb…. all at once there arose a Thought within me and I asked myself “What art thou afraid of?” … Behold thou art fatherless, outcast and the universe is mine (says the Devil) to which my whole ME now made answer: “I am not thine but Free and forever hate thee” [pp. 210–211].

Hunter (1995) describes how this reemergence of the self was accompanied, during and in the years after the Enlightenment, by a rediscovery both of the natural environment and of the brotherhood of man, that is, of the human community as an innate system of what the philosopher J. MacMurray (1970) (under whom Fairbairn and Sutherland had both studied at Edinburgh University) described as “persons-in-relation.”

So, here, indeed, is a meaningful connection at a number of different levels which has helped me to set the scene for a somewhat condensed consideration of the theories of Suttie, Fairbairn, and Sutherland.

As my thesis is about the connections between three theorists of Scottish origin, I will try to briefly distill from Fairbairn’s theories that which most obviously links him with Suttie before him and with Sutherland after.

Ian Suttie

It is now acknowledged that Suttie is a significant object relations theorist who anticipated ideas now more or less taken for granted.

As a way of briefly describing Suttie’s line of thought, let me draw on two reviews of his book Origins of Love and Hate (Suttie, 1988) which are quoted in D. Heard’s introduction. These reviews reflect both the positive and negative impact of his ideas. Suttie died at age 46, a few days before his book was published.

The review by Karan Stephen (1936) considered that it was stimulating for those steeped in a particular hypothesis to hear it vigorously attacked. For her, there was more to the book than criticism (of Freud). Suttie, she thought, had an original point of view to expound, and the originality lay in two concepts: First, that sociability, the craving for companionship (the infant’s only way of self-preservation), the need to love and be loved, to exchange and to participate, are as primary as sexuality itself and are not derivatives of it; second, whenever this primary social love or tenderness fails to find the response it seeks, the frustration produces a kind of anxiety (separation anxiety), which is the starting point of neurotic maladjustment. Suttie was saying that behind the anxiety lay the dread of separation, the dread of being cut off from human sympathy and contact, represented in the first instance by the loss of the mother. Stephen regretted that the arguments put forward by Suttie took the form of a personal attack on Freud. Suttie, in effect, was replacing Freud’s libido theory with the idea of an innate need for companionship, a love that is independent of genital appetite. In his review, Money-Kyrle (1936) commented that Suttie’s book would be well received by all who wished to underestimate the extent of infantile sexuality and aggression. He admits, however, that Suttie’s criticisms are near enough the mark to stimulate research. One suspects that Money-Kyrle may in particular have been responding to Suttie’s bold summary of his ideas when he stated that “the most important aspect of mental development is the idea of others and of one’s own relationship to them—Man (for Freud) he continued is a bundle of energies seeking to dissipate themselves but restrained by fear” (pp. 29–35). Against this idea Suttie says, “I regard expression not as an outpouring for its own sake, but as an overture demanding response from others. It is the absence of this response, I think, that is the source of all anxiety and rage” (pp. 29–35).

In contrast to Freud’s emphasis on the instincts and his viewing of the infant as initially autoerotic, Suttie (1988) focused on issues of relatedness. He made his contrasting and challenging position clear when he stated that the child “wakes up to life with the germ of parenthood, the impulse to give and to respond already in it. The impulse with the need ‘to get’ attention and recognition, and so on motivates the free give-and-take of fellowship” (p. 58). Central to Suttie’s thesis, and again in contrast to Freud (and Klein), was his belief that all aggressive and antipathetic feeling was evoked by a relationship to the social environment.

For Suttie, frustrated social love turns to anxiety and then hate if the frustration is sufficiently severe. It goes without saying that this line of thought had important implications for therapy. It involved a shift that emphasized the therapist’s capacity to relate in what Suttie described as a “feeling interest relationship with the patient” (p. 212). He thought the approach helped establish “a fellowship of suffering” (p. 212) between patient and analyst. Suttie amplified the therapeutic importance of an empathetic response to the patient’s suffering, which, in effect, can be seen to be linked with Suttie’s belief in Ferenczi’s dictum, “It is the physician’s love that heals the patient” (p. 212). One detects, in both Ferenczi and Suttie, the importance of the subjective nature of suffering and emotional understanding between patient and analyst: Suttie had much to say about the taboo on tenderness in general and in therapeutic work, in particular: “that so harmless and amiable emotion (of tenderness), the very stuff of sociability” (p. 80). He thought a taboo on tenderness had become institutionalized in psychoanalysis. While the final paragraph of R. M. Rilke’s (1934) eighth letter in Letters to a Young Poet speaks perhaps to all of us, I suspect that Suttie, and Ferenczi before him, would have been specially appreciative. Rilke said, “Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words” (p. 72). Space does not allow an elaboration of the fact that Suttie’s Christian beliefs were also a significant influence in his theorizing and therapeutic approach. I mention this partly because I think a religious or spiritual element is clearly discernible in the lives of all three men, although not openly expressed by either Fairbairn or Sutherland.

Suttie’s focus on the idea that the infant is born to be companionable rather than to be just an id, until thwarted, and on the notion of an innate capacity for social relatedness is the most fundamental connection between his and Fairbairn’s theories.

Ronald Fairbairn

Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) point out that, while Klein and Winnicott made their contributions to a thoroughgoing revision of Freud, Fairbairn was the only one who systematically scrutinized structure and only he openly challenged Freudian theory.

John Padel (1989) quotes Sutherland as saying (many years back), “You could count on the fingers of one hand all the British psychoanalysts who have read the whole of Fairbairn’s published work; yet there is not much of it and it is so clear and comprehensive.” While Padel must be acknowledged as a torch bearer, it is Sutherland who has given us the clearest account to date of Fairbairn’s work. Sutherland (1994d, p. 339) considered the significance of Fairbairn’s contribution to psychoanalysis to be that Fairbairn was the first to propose, in a systematic manner, the Copernican change involved in founding the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on the experience within social relationships, instead of on the discharge of instinctual tensions originating solely within the individual. In short, he replaced the closed-system standpoint of 19th-century science with the open-system concepts evolved by the middle of the present century to account for the development of living organisms in which the contribution of the environment is central.

All things considered, I think we have to see Fairbairn’s partly self-enforced geographical isolation as a secondary factor in the hostility created by his radical challenge to Freudian theory. To underline the revolutionary nature of his theories, I will take just the first six points of Fairbairn’s (1963) synopsis of an object relations theory of the personality:

An Ego is present at birth.

Libido is a function of the ego.

There is no death instinct; and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation, there is no such thing as an id.

The ego and therefore libido, is fundamentally object seeking.

The earliest and original form of anxiety experienced by the child is separation anxiety.

It was also his idea that structure and energy are inseparable, an idea that highlighted the theoretical cul-de-sac of Freud’s psychic apparatus, which had led psychoanalysis into describing an unstructured id and a highly structured (but weak) ego (Yankelovich and Barrett, 1971, p. 163).

Fairbairn may have been prophetic in seeing the aspects of Freud’s theories that had to go, for we now know that object relationship begins with birth, or, surprisingly, even before, if we follow Sir Thomas Browne, writing in Religio Medici in 1630, “in that obscure world the womb of our mother … it awaits the opportunity of objects” (McIntyre, 1996, private communication). We now know that his uncompromising alternative to drive-discharge theory was too radical and too difficult to be accepted and the fruitful discussion that Ernest Jones had predicted (Fairbairn, 1952) did not occur in Fairbairn’s lifetime.

An obvious and clear connection between Suttie and Fairbairn is their view of environmental failure (or perhaps we should say interpersonal failure) as being the root of all pathological reactions. Fairbairn took a further theoretical step when he said all pathology is essentially a withdrawal from, which is to say a defense against, the trauma of not feeling intimately loved. He was referring to what he considered to be the mother’s failure to convince her child that she herself loves him as a person. As a result, the child comes to feel that his own love for his mother is not really valued and accepted by her.

For Fairbairn the mother’s personalized love for the child is crucial. Fairbairn thought that, from the child’s point of view, when the child feels that his love has destroyed his mother’s feeling for him, then we have the origin of the schizoid state, which is characterized by emotional withdrawal. Insofar as the child feels his hate has destroyed his mother’s feeling for him, we have the origin of the depressive state. Fairbairn pointed out that the study of the person at the personal level, with all his or her subjectivity, has to be the essential focus. Concepts that reduced phenomena to impersonal processes were not acceptable to him. This philosophical stance was consistently sustained throughout his life and is reflected in his theorizing and therapeutic aims (see Sutherland, 1994d, p. 335).

Fairbairn’s explanation for the universality of schizoid phenomena is that their fundamental determinant consists of splits in the initial whole ego or self, a process from which no one is entirely free. Psychoanalytic treatment, according to Fairbairn, attempts to unify the split psyche. He preferred to think in terms of a synthesis rather than an analysis for the integration of the split self. He believed that, through healing splits in the self, the patient is enabled to interact with, and be affected by, the open system of outer reality. According to Fairbairn, the patient’s maintaining his inner world as a closed system, that is, significantly cut off from real relationships, has been partially determined by the sense of hopelessness in obtaining any satisfactions from objects or persons in external reality on whom he might allow himself to become dependent. From a treatment point of view, Fairbairn believed that analytic interpretation was not sufficient. He thought that it was the actual relationship between patient and analyst that was the crucial factor in psychoanalytical cure or change in the patient. By the actual relationship, Fairbairn meant not only the transference relationship but also the total relationship between patient and analyst as persons. Rather than aiming at the resolution of unconscious conflict over pleasure-seeking impulses, he strove to restore direct and full contact with real other human beings. Fairbairn said that the analyst’s task is to force himself into the closed system of the patient. The patient opposes the analyst’s efforts by using transference; that is, the analyst is transformed into figures in the patient’s closed-system world. Fairbairn (1958) quotes the four factors involved in psychoanalytic “cure” first identified by Gitelson: insight, recall of infantile memories, catharsis, and the relationship with the analyst. Gitelson (1951) argued that cure was affected not by one factor, but by a synthesis of all four; and, while this view obviously appealed to Fairbairn, he believed that the decisive factor is the relationship with the analyst. Not only was it on this relationship that the other factors mentione...