Analysts on the Couch: Part II: Fairbairn and Guntrip

[Editor’s Note: In our last issue we began Andrew Brink’s indepth review essay on the psychobiographies of three famous analysts with his study of three famous analysts with his

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study of three famous analysts with his thoughtful essay on Brett Kahr’s study of Donald Winnicott. In Part II, Brink exams the lives of Fairbairn and Guntrip, and concludes with some insightful comments on writing psychobiography.]

Review essay of:

Jeremy Hazell, H.J.S. Guntrip: A Psychoanalytical Biography. London: Free Association Books, 1996. ISBN 1853433330 (pb.), xiii, 356 pp., $22.50

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Brett Kahr, D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1996. ISBN 0823666840, xxix, 189 pp., $40

J.D. Sutherland, Fairbairn’s Journey Into the Interior. London: Free Association Books, 1989. ISBN 1853430595 (pb.), xiv, 191 pp., out of print.

Sutherland’s Fairbairn

The most speculative of the three psychobiographies under review is Sutherland’s of Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1964) because Fairbairn’s rare psychosomatic symptom was obscure in origin. The challenge was to explain Fairbairn’s painful urinary retention from which he was unable to get relief after onset in 1934. It is sobering to realize that for all his psychological curiosity and powerful intellect, Fairbairn was incapable of modifying this “hysterical” symptom whose origin he assigned to early trauma. No simple physiological cause was found for inability to urinate, especially in public, from which his father had also suffered. In analysis, or self-analysis, Fairbairn did not sufficiently recover his distressed feelings about his father’s weakness and his mother’s domination to accept and integrate them. Sutherland’s interpretation of the symptom is coextensive with his understanding of Fairbairn’s personality, a highly gifted only child formed in late Victorian Calvinist Edinburgh. As the symptom proved to be invasive, governing Fairbairn’s ability to travel and appear in public, it is well worth the attention given it.

Sutherland’s view is that the symptom became dominant upon retraumatizing by a convergence of life events. Fairbairn’s wife, who was impatient with his psychological preoccupations, had verbally attacked him at the same time as colleagues in the psychology department were persecuting his “unscientific” interest in psychoanalysis. He then suffered an acute renal colic with hematuria, painfully passing a stone. Bad relations with his wife awakened early attachment anxiety and, sensitized by reading Melanie Klein on the child’s interior fantasy to feelings he did not know he had, Fairbairn seems to have regressed, losing the intellectual control by which he usually managed his life. Sutherland comments,

Clinical experience would at once suggest that the symptom had arisen from a sharp splitting off in his self of a deep sadistic rage against his internal bad mother. (p. 36) … We can assume his block to be the essential depressive one, that is, how to make restitution of the inner parents destroyed by sadistic attacks when it was the invasions of these fantasies in his own inner world that were troubling him. (p. 54)

With no analyst to help Fairbairn negotiate unconscious sadistic fantasies, he was left to split off his hostility if creativity was to be preserved.

All his ideals and principles led him to contain this situation, though the stress was expressed in the urinary retention symptom which constituted by now a more persistent manifestation of his serious conflict. In an entirely negative environment, it is doubtful if he could have kept his creative self active in any other way. (p. 54)

Fairbairn was certainly interested in creativity, including artistic creativity. His “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art” (1938) detects a struggle with “a combination of sadism and restitution” in the Surrealist Salvadore Dali’s paintings of dismembered women—especially a picture called “Spectre du sex appeal” in which a small boy contemplates “a colossal” yet “deformed, and mutilated” female form, with various missing body parts. The picture helped Fairbairn to recognize and accept his own sadism (and wish for repair) that went with ambivalent feelings towards his controlling mother who had shamed his earliest sexual interest in touching his body.

Fairbairn was shrewd enough to assign his suffering to traumatic events in early childhood, as his self-analytic notes show. The notes of 1939 state mainly that his mother’s ambitions had “strengthened his narcissism,” conferring a sense of special destiny and even putting him in a feminine role, so close had he been to mother and distant from father. The urinary symptom may have had something to do with wishing to be female, as well as non-identification with his father. By 1950-1955, however, the notes focus more on his aggressive wife’s replicating “castrating” mother, with supporting father figures (university colleagues) now in a hostile role. “He felt strongly he was not treated by his mother as a person in his early years,” Sutherland writes. (p. 81) Not only was there mother’s early censorious attitude to touching his penis, together with warnings about sexual feelings for “bad women,” there had been the traumatizing incident of witnessing his father’s urgent need to urinate while riding in a railway carriage. This too left Fairbairn

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with hostility for the embarrassment and “a secret satisfaction from his suffering.” (p. 71) Other traumatic incidents are remembered: unwanted touching by a man in a park and the death of a little girl in a road accident for which he felt responsible. Sutherland does not fully sort these out any more than Fairbairn had been able to do, but he convincingly shows just how much guilty self-persecution and hidden aggression had been engendered by unassimilated early experience.

In 1940, Fairbairn began to delineate what he called “schizoid” pathology, to which he later added a reconfigured bipolar ego. He had recognized and could tolerate his feelings enough to conceptualize them into a brilliant new model of endopsychic structure no longer depending on discharge of instinctual tensions arising entirely within the child. He saw internalized conflict as the product of defects in the mother-infant relationship, redefining developmental stages and the defenses. Replacing oedipal pathology with the primacy of bad mothering, Fairbairn postulated an ego split between “libidinal” (exciting) and “antilibidinal” (persecuting) intemalizations of the mother. As he had little to say for a “death instinct” other than that it was a masochistic relationship with an internalized bad object derived from mothering, he challenged both Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s claims as to the source of infantile hate. Indeed, Sutherland rightly calls Fairbairn’s papers revising endopsychic theory (published in 1952 as Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality) a “Copernican change” by showing with clarity why “object seeking” rather than drive discharge is primary in human experience. Fairbairn attributed all psychopathology to splitting of the self in early maternal relations, thereby bringing forward trauma as the primary pathogen. He thus set the stage for far more empirical studies of development dm had been possible with Freud’s model. Sutherland’s achievement is to show the difficult passage through an unresolved “creative illness” that nonetheless produced a set of brilliant insights for others to build upon.

Hazell’s Guntrip

As the story of psychological regeneration, undoubtedly Hazell’s H.J S. Guntrip: A Psychoanalytical Biography is the most remarkable. It is the most detailed and best documented of the three biographies, and it portrays a personality intrepid for self-truth that reminds us of the great crusading efforts of English Nonconformity that began with soul-searching and conversion. It is a “Pilgrim’s Progress” from entrapment in bad childhood—a neglectful and persecuting mother and remote father—to liberation to becoming a deeply understanding and caring psychotherapist. Indeed, Harry Guntrip (1901-1975) had begun his search in institutional Christianity, in Methodism, the Salvation Army, and eventually as a Congregational minister. But his wish to help others only disclosed his own incapacity and need for psychological healing. Like the early Puritans, Guntrip assiduously kept detailed records of his emotional and physical sufferings, together with the increasingly effective determination to find help in psychoanalysis. He was to learn that the way to personal truth was not through some supernatural intervention, or even through the direct agency of an authoritative therapist, but by taking account of dreams as opening the pathway to authentic feelings about childhood attachments. The quest was to set in motion natural healing forces, inherent in his own psyche, recognizing that this was only possible through submitting to the discipline of transference to an analyst. Guntrip was extremely fortunate to find analysts of the caliber of Fairbairn and Winnicott, both discontented Freudians establishing adult “object relations” as the product of actual mother-child interactions at the start of life.

Readers of Guntrip’s most influential books, Personality Structure and Human Interaction (1968) and Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self (1968) may not realize the cost at which they came. Hazell’s achievement is to make this personal cost entirely clear, as Guntrip himself wanted it to be. Never again will it be possible to dissociate the author’s emergence from psychological distress from his theoretical statements. Blending science with the arts (and not forgetting therapy as an extension of ministry), Guntrip’s version of psychoanalysis was about discovering authentic personhood beyond the compromised strategies for survival used by badly parented children. He himself had been brought to a standstill by inexplicable bouts of exhaustion. Tension, hyperactivity, and insomnia led him in 1936 into therapy in London with the Freudian doctors, Crichton-Miller and Clifford Allen. They rather moralistically diagnosed “mother-fixated Narcissism,” finding him trying to resist his father’s passivity. (p. 27) But oedipal theory alone could not discover the true roots of Guntrip’s trouble.

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Discovery of his own schizoid pathology through analysis and work with patients was the opening that Guntrip needed for theoretical advances. The cause was not alone the trauma of his loved but rivaled infant brother Percy’s dying when Guntrip was about three. Guntrip himself had become dangerously ill from maternal neglect after this death, and an amnesia formed around the events which persisted until a dream in late life brought out the feelings. The real source of schizoid emptiness was his manipulating and dismissing mother, who herself suffered an unhappy childhood and never really wanted children of her own. At most, her caregiving had been adequate only for a brief period of Guntrip’s infancy, after which she became angry and punitive, and on occasion beat him. Guntrip thus realized that he was less caught in oedipal rivalry (he longed for his good but remote father more than for his mother) than in fear of guilt and even non-being when his mother refused to respond to his need for attachment.

It was essentially an attachment phenomenology of the “anxious-avoidant” type that Guntrip was constrained to investigate in himself and to theorize, though that term would be introduced later after more refinement of “object relations” theory. Nevertheless, what happened was a massive shift away from drive theory to recognition of the primary reliance of infants on their mothers and the fear-inspiring consequences of dismissive or inconsistent mothering. As Hazell writes of a realization when in therapy with Winnicott, “the ‘vital heart’ of Guntrip’s personality was simply unevoked, unrelated, and dissociated, entirely dependent for life upon someone’s recognition.” (p. 240) Guntrip came to feel that Fairbairn had not fully appreciated the depth of emptiness he recognized, insisting too much upon internalized persecutory “bad objects,” and not enough on unevoked potential; his mode of analysis had been too oedipal. Winnicott, on the other hand, had allowed penetration to the core of depersonalized unreality, but he too clung to a classic id theory that barred the way to the most accurate formulation of the schizoid problem. It was finally Fairbairn’s theory of internalization that Guntrip sought to augment as he wrote about the medium of personal relationships in which a child must grow or fail to grow. His predicament was that of the child withdrawing from a persecuting mother into a protective schizoid state which, while it decreased vulnerability, increased a sense of isolated, unlived life. Hysterical and obsessional defenses were powerless to mitigate this deep state of deprivation, which had to be reached and replenished as Winnicott’s re-mothering therapy tended to do. The upshot in 1959 was that Guntrip suggested to Fairbairn that his endopsychic theory would benefit from recognizing the deepest split of all

in which part of the hungry, angry, clamouring “libidinal ego,” in addition to turning against itself by identifying with the rejecting object, “gives up the struggle and just withdraws from pressure and deprivation, and becomes a ‘Regressed Ego,’ detached and schizoid.” (p. 188)

The suggestion was accepted, although by then Fairbairn’s poor health prevented revision of his published views.

Hazell makes the point that Guntrip’s insights were won out of personal struggle to encounter disowned feelings and accept them as his to work with. There is no minimizing of the difficulties of overcoming resistances in himself, of his personal, family, and professional relations, not to mention the sometimes severe emotional set-backs in the course of analyses. No amount of intellectualizing could deliver him from the schizoid predicament, with PhD studies in psychology only a useful professional adjunct to the real work in analysis and experience with patients. (A remarkable feature of Guntrip’s story is the exceptional understanding of his wife Bertha, who admirably accepted stresses that might have sunk a lesser person.) Guntrip also showed an unfailing wish for repair in the alliances he made both with therapists and colleagues who understood what he was after. Of course, he was misunderstood by some colleagues in the University of Leeds Department of Psychiatry and, like Fairbairn, he was driven onto a lonely course. The greatest recognition came from America, where he effectively lectured at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry and elsewhere. It is not surprising that his remarkable trove of joumals, self-analytic notes, and other papers should find safe deposit in the Menninger Library in Kansas, where Hazell had complete access.

Today Guntrip would be recognized as an emotionally and physically abused child and the mystery of his suffering would not be so difficult to penetrate. It is important to realize the expenditure of energy it took to find help to initiate self-healing by freeing dreams which enabled

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reconfiguring of the past. Collapse after the trauma of seeing infant brother Percy dead in his mother’s lap had been preceded by a still earlier illness when his developing being was not responded to and later assailed by guilt-making discipline. It was necessary to bring together this entire picture before permanent healing could begin and, through much of the 20 years of analysis, Guntrip did depend greatly on his analysts for sustainment.

When freeing came in later life, it resulted in a directness, purposefulness and even exuberance remarkable for its authenticity. He was zealous to promote “object relations” and his own contributions to the theory, but there was no misplaced confidence. He was a shrewd realist, generous and ready to exchange ideas and feelings with no suggestion of professional superiority. I found Guntrip about the most honest, direct, and penetrating person I have ever met, and he was exceptionally helpful in supporting the ideas about creativity in the arts I was then trying to form. Freeing life-affirming creativity, after all, was what his entire quest was about. He was under no illusion that “cures” in the medical sense were possible in psychoanalysis. His statement is:

There is no such thing [as a cure]. What does happen is that one is put in a stronger position internally to experience, with fuller understanding, the ways in which the old ingrown bad-relation patterns are aroused and disturbed by present day affairs…. If the past is never totally outgrown, neither is the whole personal self static … while a genuine therapeutic relationship is being experienced. (pp. 314-315)

Reparative transformation would be a better term than “cure,” and of this Guntrip gave living evidence. It was dismaying that cancer took him at 74 during the height of his powers.

Comments

It is important to discuss these psychobiographies together as the careers were interconnected, for the most part productively. The linking figure is Harry Guntrip, analysed first by Fairbairn, then by Winnicott. Fairbairn was educated in philosophy and medicine, and had analysis with E. H. Connell. He spent his entire professional life in Edinburg where, in 1949, Guntrip went for treatment. This was not Guntrip’s first attempt at psychological healing, but it was his real starting point as Fairbairn had developed the idea of internalized persecuting “objects” from bad mothering. Guntrip had 736 sessions with Fairbairn, lasting five-and-one-half years. By 1954, however, Guntrip’s struggle with his bad internalized mother was not responding as well as he had hoped to Fairbairn’s style of analysis, which was more Freudian than his theory would indicate. In 1962 he began analysis in London with Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) completing 152 sessions by 1969. Thus Fairbairn’s and Winnicott’s theories of how emotional disorder develop, while not entirely compatible, both contributed to Guntrip’s original thinking about schizoid states. It is worth remembering that, when Fairbairn first published his object relations theory of the personality in 1952, Winnicott and Masud Khan attacked it in a review for “knocking” Freud. Alarmed by Fairbairn’s move away from drive theory, they neglected to acknowledge his profound respect for Freud’s original work and its compatibility with their own work.

Conventional biography too often merely sketches in the subject’s family background, noting parentage and birth, before going on to education and entry into adulthood. Detailed examination of early attachment experience is neglected, even with evidence available. When there is psychopathology which cannot be dodged, biographers may try to account for it, but the attempt is apt to be inexpert. By contrast, the analytically trained biographer relies on a working theory indicating “what to go for” in assessing dislocations of early maternal and paternal attachments. The theory sets out to explain adaptations and defensive maladaptations to parenting, resulting in a more objective account of personality formation. Sometimes the theory is explicit, sometimes implicit, and it must not be worked too hard, as mercifully it isn’t in the psychobiographies under review. The matter is especially sensitive in the cases of Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip as they were themselves such farseeing innovators in the field of object-relations, prefiguring John Bowlby’s attachment theory and its more recent refinements. The psychobiographers’ problem is to convincingly relate their attempted adaptations to early childhood stresses to the psychodynamic theories they elaborated after becoming acquainted with their inner worlds of conflicted feelings. Sutherland, Kahr, and Hazell turn back on their analysts and mentors the very theories, and clinical skills, they learned from them. They try convincingly to account for the stunning originality of these post-Freudians in terms of the urge to

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generalize beyond the therapeutic release from the closed defensive systems to which pathogenic parenting had consigned them. For all their tough-mindedness, they show respect and compassion, with results quite different from the idealization, adulation, or ironic detachment characteristic of students remembering their mentors.

The prototype is, of course, Ernest Jones’ Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953-1957). Jones aimed at the truth about the personal and scientific origin of Freud’s ideas, but the first psychoanalyst had not helped. “Let the biographers chafe; we won’t make it too easy for them,” Jones’s introduction quotes Freud as having said. Jones was restricted to an oedipal interpretation of the origin of Freud’s teachings and did not fully enter the then speculative area of early attachment experiences. Jones’ insufficiently critical biography has been repeatedly reworked, as requirements for the “flawless integrity” (p. 283) Jones attributed to Freud have become more stringent. It is unlikely that the psychobiographies under review will be subjected to such determined revisionism. As they are not limited by oedipal theory but broadly informed by research in the psychopathology of child development, their findings may be augmented and adjusted but are unlikely to be challenged. The best heading under which to consider each of them is what Henri Ellenburger called the “creative illness,” that is, safe passage through the rigors of discovery of the origin of inner conflict which yields general truth about emotional suffering.

Psychohistorians with their psychobiographical bent will be heartened by these outstanding examples of the craft. Claims for a developmental history of childrearing could not be more strongly put as each of these analysts exemplifies the consequences of maternal intrusiveness at the end of the Victorian era. Evidence appears for a mother, or caretaker, saying in effect “You can have love when I have full control over you,” as deMause puts it in his “Psychogenic Theory of History.” Each was a prophet of more enlightened child-rearing, having nearly succumbed to the psychological hazards of manipulation in too tightly organized families with pathological elements in them. Psychoanalysis as rescue was too urgent to permit the orthodoxy of Freudian drive theory when it was evident that psychological pain resulted from bad “object relations.” The interest of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud in the pre-oedipal phase opened the way for Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip to explore this phase of development because it was there they recognized the source of their suffering. They became practical prophets of the Helping Mode of childrearing by discovering therapeutic reparative techniques for disorders they themselves suffered. This is the strength of the biographical contribution to their already well-known theories. Sutherland, Kahr, and Hazel establish an unbreakable link between personal experience and concepts considered by many as difficult to grasp. In respect of willingness to be known first as suffering persons, these British analysts are perhaps unique. Their candid reporting in journals of personal struggles, and the clarity of language in which they theorized, differs markedly from say the French followers of Jacques Lacan, whose often opaque intellectualizing has so invaded the Humanities.

Will the Humanities benefit from these psychobiographies? It seems that they are too much terra incognita to make much difference at present. Analysts will read them, but few potential biographers of leaders, or creative or innovative persons, will. Were they taken seriously, there would have to be a shift away from hyper-intellectual abstractions in literary studies, from conventional ideas of causality in politics and history, and from dominant cognitive assumptions in philosophy. There is little evidence that the discovery of the unconscious as the primary formative force in human motivation is about to revolutionize teaching and writing in the Humanities. Were it to be so, the mainly defensive purpose of most discourse would have to give way to a “connected” discourse, true to the inner being of the persons using it. As such an achievement is not among the objectives of graduate school training, we must hope that those few academics fortunate enough to have dual training will write books that cannot be ignored. Smatterings of psychoanalytic terms and ideas will not help much in academic writing, but the thoroughgoing experience of self as agent of truth-seeking could revolutionize the academic pursuit. The “wounded healers” Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip exemplify what is needed if integrity is to be restored to the quest for truth in human affairs. This is a high demand to place on anybody, and it has to come mainly from within.

There are useful cautionary guides as to how psychobiography should be used and not used, for instance, William McKinley Runyan’s Life

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Histories and Psychobiography (1984). Alan C. Elms’ Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994) shows in practice the principles of careful and discerning psychobiography, along with consideration of basic principles. A rare attempt to align the unconscious of the biographer with his chosen subject is made in the collection edited by historians Samuel H. Baron and Carl Pletch, Introspection in Biography: The Biographer’s Quest for Self-Awareness (1985). Excellent though much of this material is, it is only exploratory, with the full-scale study of psychoanalytic method in biography waiting to be written. Discussion of principles and practices should not be left to research psychologists alone. Yet even the most historically informed among analysts would probably shy away from such a project in the riven and often inflamed arena where psychoanalysis operates. There is much critical consolidation of basic theory to get through before more rarefied questions of biography can be addressed. Meanwhile it would be helpful if readers of these biographies of leading British analysts would ask themselves about implications for studies in the Humanities, which have been drifting away from questions of human interaction into disconnected abstractions. It may be too much to ask, say, convinced deconstructionists, to reconsider the relevance of abusive child-rearing to the choice of subject matter for fiction, or the quest for power in political leadership. Regrounding of Humanities studies in actual human developmental experience is desperately needed, but academics at present seem incapable of this, despite its being the only way forward.

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