Fairbairn’s Contribution to Psychoanalysis

Review of Graham S. Clarke, Personal Relations Theory: Fairbairn. Macmurrav and Suttie. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. ISBN 0-415-39352-3, 211 pages, $35.95.

Graham Clarke proposes “prime status” for the work of the Edinburgh psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1965). By placing it with other Scottish studies of human relations, he gives context to Fairbairn’s bold rewriting of Freud, Melanie Klein, and their followers. Fairbairn’s revisionist theory is presented as the most cogent and coherent response to Freud’s tripartite model of the ego as modified by Klein’s theory of inner objects (internalized significant others). Fairbairn is seen as a philosophically trained critic, working far from Vienna and London, who addressed theoretical shortcomings with a powerful new model of the ego derived from internalizing the infant’s actual experiences of being mothered. For Fairbairn, ego structure was not innate but acquired from anxiety caused by failed relations of infant and mother. It pointed to a two-part analysis of interaction to account for “splitting” and repression in the ego, a line of advance that has continued ever since, especially in the United Kingdom, from the child analyst Donald Winnicott to the psychobiological researcher and framer of attachment theory, John Bowlby. This theoretical shift could not be more important and is certainly of interest to psychohistorians.

Fairbairn has not lacked for recent scholarly attention, but Clarke’s book is the first with such detailed discussion of his primacy. Asking “Why Fairbairn?”, Clarke sets out eleven opening propositions, noting that as virtually all psychoanalytic theories

Page 95

and practices are now “object relational,” it is time to acknowledge that “Fairbairn’s ‘psychology of dynamic [ego] structure’ is capable of providing a common model for psychoanalysis” (p. 10). This sweeping claim sets a task so large that no single book could hope to complete it, and Clarke’s readers will be looking for what he oversimplifies and leaves out.

My view is that while Graham Clarke’s exposition of Fairbairn’s demanding thought is by far the best yet, his over all sense of the accelerations, changing directions, and emphases in psychoanalysis are inadequate to make the case for Fairbairn’s thought being definitive. For years I have admired Fairbairn and his first advocate, Harry Guntrip, learning to think (and to feel) as they taught, but I know they are bound by time and place and that psychodynamic theorizing has moved on apace. In fact it has moved so far and changed so much that “object relations” talk may sound quaint and its formulations incapable of doing full justice to the findings of attachment research and, more recently, those of neurochemistry and brain localizations of attachment experience. A quick look at the historical necessity for revisionist theory following upon Freud’s rediscovery and conceptualizing of the unconscious will help to take Fairbairn’s measure and to put Clarke’s claims in fuller perspective

Precursors of Fairbairn’s re-thinking are found amongst Freud’s early associates, especially Otto Rank, with his emphasis on birth trauma, and Sandor Ferenczi, who emphasized the traumatic dislocations of attachment between parents and their children that led to later emotional disorders. Though these attempts to override the Oedipus complex in favor of pre-oedipal issues put Rank and Ferenczi outside Freud’s charmed circle, they appealed especially to the Scots Ian Suttie and Ronald Fairbairn as giving new openings for psychoanalytic theory, which eventually lead to attachment theory. Clarke did not pick up on this as he does not believe that Bowlby (who never repudiated his psychoanalytic training) was any longer a psychoanalyst. Clarke comments: “The main problem with attachment theory is that it is not a psychoanalytic theory at all since the unconscious is generally regarded as being totally biological in origin, attachment being a biological process…” (p. 142). While it is certainly possible to get this impression from the rigorously argued three volumes of John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss (1969-1980), it is not the conclusion gained from wide reading in attachment theory, especially the papers of Mary Main and Patricia Crittenden, left unmentioned by Clarke.

In this respect Clarke’s book is left marooned on a sort of Fairbaimian island where intensive exposition is carried on. There is some justification for this as, despite Fairbairn’s efforts towards clear and systematic reasoning, his thought is often held to be unintelligible. Nonetheless, the essence of Fairbairn’s challenge to Freud can briefly be clarified as he himself did in chapter VII of Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1951), “A Synopsis of the Development of the Author’s Views Regarding the Structure of the Personality.”

Initial criticism of Fairbairn was because he replaced Freud’s instinct theory with an interpersonal relations theory. Fairbairn’s heresy was in arguing that our behavior turns on internalizations at the start of life when mother’s caregiving is more or less satisfactory. The quality of caring interaction was what determined healthy or pathological development, as Fairbairn set out in the prepositional, formal style of a philosopher, and so is hard to follow as he added meanings to terms like libido and ego.

Clarke supplies many charts to show how inimical internalizations cause splitting and set up one or more combinations of four basic defensive systems against reliving suffering: the paranoid, phobic, hysterical, and obsessional. The defenses adopted have lifelong implications for the individual and also affect the dynamics of groups. Put simply, what the child most needs is “conclusive assurance that he is genuinely loved as a person by his parents, and that his parents genuinely accept his love” (p. 39). Only in positive circumstances can “infantile dependence,” or the “taking” mode be left behind in favor of “mature dependence,” the “giving” mode. Thus Freud’s set developmental stages were also abandoned. Psychopathology is seen in terms of the “relationships with internal objects, to which the individual is compelled to turn in default of a satisfactory relationship with objects in the outer world” (p. 40).

Contemporary psychoanalysis gives evidence of having understood Fairbairn’s main arguments. It may not credit him by name, or even cite his writings, but it caught the message that primary experiences between mother/father and infant/child determine ego formation with the kind and degree of de-

Page 96

fensiveness to be seen in early relational malfunctions. Fairbairn is usually named first in the so-called “Independent Branch” of the “British School” of post-Freudian revisionists who looked to pre-oedipal phenomena and took the pre-1897 Freud at his word about the damaging effects of parent or caregiver-caused trauma.

The barrage of new information from attachment research and neurochemical investigation goes on increasing. Fairbairn would have been astounded, yet pleased at having wedged the door open to such enquiry. His Scottish humanist underpinnings served him well, along with shrewd independent judgment and a determination to be as clear a revisionist as circumstances allowed. But psychoanalysis is radically different now, and we should not be misled by Clarke into thinking that Fairbairn’s theories are a good stopping-off place. They are still instructive, and Clarke pays moving tribute to a brave thinker. In that spirit let us go forward as directed by the best contemporary research and resulting clinical innovations. It is too soon to know exactly how the history of psychoanalysis should be written, but I would not like to see any of the recent work relegated as “not psychoanalysis”—Fairbairn deserves his rightful place.

As to social and political applications, Clarke is similarly limited by equating Fairbairn’s idea of “mature dependence” with the prospect of a radically improved social order in which equality, fraternity, and reciprocity are foremost. But this seems pie-in-the-sky thinking in our era of ingrained sectarian hatreds and violence to which negotiated solutions often seem impossible. Clarke undervalues Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Test and Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview when he says merely that they “measure the degree of splitting in the inner reality of the person” (p. 180), when they actually offer a whole new range of possibilities in accounting for character formation.

It is important to know what developmental factors allow monsters of persecution and political killing like Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein. Of course, such persons are not available for the Adult Attachment Interview, reconstructing present feelings about their developmental past as opposed to the immediacy of the traumas suffered by shell-shocked soldiers dealt with by Fairbairn. The personality distortions in national leaders engaging in warfare were yet to be conceptualized. But experience with the Interview gives clear indications of what traumatic events must have occurred in childhood to account for the wish to do harm without conscience. Violence is thus seen as failures of attachment as have already been shown for Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein in Patricia Crittenden’s analysis of pathological child development. These investigations are just opening up, and Fairbairn, who was deeply concerned about shellshock and the effects of war, would have applauded.

Page 97