The Schizoid Analysts Who Brought Relationship to Psychoanalysis (article)

An aspect of psychohistory with a special human interest appeal explores the inter-influence of individual problems and cultural innovation. This issue has notable pertinence for the development of psychoanalysis where, as Ronald Fairbairn observed: “I can’t think what could motivate any of us to become psychotherapists, if we hadn’t got problems of our own” (Harry Guntrip, “My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1975, 2, 145).

Continuing with the focus on the British psychoanalysts Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1964), Harry Guntrip (1901-1975), and Donald W. Winnicott (1896-1971), I would like to reflect on how

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the need to resolve deep personal maternal conflict contributed to a paradigm-changing modification of Freudian psychoanalysis. The British “independent” object-relational school of analytic thought, primarily represented by these three, argued persuasively for the essential influence of the external other (object in the language of psychoanalysis), both in the initial mother-infant shaping of the infant’s inner world and in the analytic reshaping of it later on. Until then, analysis—even Kleinian object relations theory maintained that mental illness was a product of inner fantasy only (even the therapeutic alliance was based on the maturing ego’s increasing capacity for relationship, rather than vice versa). Fairbairn’s famous assertion that the ego is not primarily pleasure seeking, but object seeking, was illustrated by his patient’s poignant assertion: “You’re always talking about my wanting this or that instinct satisfied; but what I really want is a father!” (“Objectrelationships and Dynamic Structure,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1946, 27, 30-

37).

With the support of psychological developmental theory (Margaret Mahler) and attachment research (John Bowlby, et al.), the importance of the infant-mother/self-other relationship has largely become a psychoanalytic assumption, and is even represented in a major “relational” school of its own. British “independent” object relations theory has now received due credit for its steadfast and often lonely stance. But less acknowledged is the original work of this group, which underlays much of their defense of relationship: the study, conceptualization, and therapeutic treatment of schizoid states.

Schizoid states, manifested in a person’s emotional detachment from others, paradoxically conceal a deep longing for relationship. Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicott learned this from extensive, challenging clinical experience. Beyond that, they learned it from a lifelong, painful exploration of their own schizoid issues. Ironically, the relational dimension was restored to psychoanalysis by insight into the “unrelatable,” “narcissistic” patient by analysts who themselves struggled with relationships. (It should be noted that although this exploration of schizoid states overarched both psychosis and personality disorder R.D. Laing’s work with schizophrenia was influenced by it the work of the object relationists were inclined more toward the comparatively stable personality type.)

The schizoid state, according to the “independent” group,

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has its origin in the earliest time of infantile development (the “oral” phase according to Freud; the “differentiation” subphase as categorized by Mahler). Briefly, as described by Guntrip, the adult schizoid withdraws from others based on the early “inability of the weak infantile ego to stand its ground and cope with outer reality in the absence of adequate maternal support” (Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, 1976, 102). Winnicott adds that this maternal absence defeats the first “spontaneous gesture” of the infant toward reception by the “maternal environment,” leading to an unsure sense of being and anxiety over the nature of relationship itself (The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1960, 140-152).

The childhood history of these three analysts reflects this infant-mother disconnection, while, to a limited degree, our picture of them as adults indicates the lasting effects of this early lack of relationship. Most convincingly, we often have their own words.

Harry Guntrip was the most outspoken. When Bernard Landis commented on the graphic quality of Guntrip’s writings about the schizoid state, Guntrip replied: “Well, it’s all first hand. I know what it is” (Bernard Landis, “Discussions with Harry Guntrip,” Contemporary Analysis, 1981, Vol. 17, No. 1, 112). He struggled to overcome the effects of a mother who, as he described to Landis, was “remote, depressed, and cruel, administering frequent and violent beatings, screaming that she never wanted to be a mother” (115). From his fifth to seventh years, she beat him with a cane until she broke it, and “when canes got broken I was sent to buy a new one” (Guntrip, 1975, 150). But an earlier traumatic occurrence summed up the source of the “agonizing fear, paralyzing depression and states of complete loneliness” that brought him into analysis (Landis, 112).

When Guntrip was three and a half years old, he had witnessed his younger brother dead on his mother’s lap; he had been told about it, but had amnesia for the event. Eventually, the trauma resolved in a dream of reaching out for a “dead object” and finding his brother “sitting on the lap of a woman who had no face, arms, or breasts” (Guntrip, 1975, 154). As he concluded: “…my basic problem [was] not the actively bad-object mother of later childhood, but the earlier mother who failed to relate at all.” His struggle, he believed, was with “…the deep fear of losing my battle with mother to keep my active self alive” (152-3).

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Winnicott’s childhood was dominated by a chronically depressed mother whose possessiveness led him to later reflect that he made his early “living” by keeping his mother alive (Minsky, Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader, 1966, 134). In his later years, he composed an intense poem comparing his relationship with his mother to a crucifixion: “Held by dead wood that has no need of me.” In an image strangely reminiscent of Guntrip’s dream, he describes himself “…stretched out on her lap/ as now on dead tree” (Francis Robert Rodman, Winnicott: Life and Work, 2003, 290).

Winnicott’s first marriage—to a delusional, highly dependent wife—recapitulated the maternal situation until his separation and eventual successful remarriage. However, it is interesting to note that this pediatrician-psychoanalyst never had children of his own. Winnicott seems not to have been as open as Guntrip in discussing his personal schizoid issues. But in his letter asserting his intellectual individuation from Melanie Klein, his analytic “mother,” he characterizes the failure of their professional relationship in the same terms he used to describe the maternal failure experienced by the schizoid: “…there should be some move from your direction towards the gesture that I make in this paper. It is a creative gesture and I cannot make any relationship through this gesture except if someone come[s] to meet it.” He concludes: “This matter which I am discussing touches the very root of my own personal difficulty…. My illness…is not far away from being the inherent difficulty in regard to human contact with external reality” (Rodman, 176-9). In this instance, Winnicott was able to reject the maternal environment that had rejected him.

Fairbairn is the least personally accessible in describing himself. However, John D. Sutherland describes Fairbairn’s “… omnipresent mother, ever watchful lest inappropriate influences should be adopted, [whose influence] produced a rather unassertive young man with a strong lifelong attachment to her” (Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior, 1989, 3). His mother’s moralistic dedication to shaming her son’s sense of male sexuality, let alone any curiosity about sexuality at all, was relentlessly verbally abusive, and could even become physically abusive. In his personal notes, Fairbairn cites a childhood episode that he considered to have a lasting effect on his development. Based on these notes, Sutherland describes how the child’s natural questioning about sexuality was met with an astonishing response from his mother: “…she got into a

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frenzy of rage, gave him a beating and then locked him in the parents’ bedroom for several hours. He felt this punishment was extremely unjust, and his bitterness gave rise, even at this early age, to thoughts of suicide…” (72).

Fairbairn’s marriage to some degree recapitulated the maternal situation, in that it involved his morally rationalized inability to free himself from an alcoholic wife who was hostile to his creative work. He unburdened himself to Guntrip about this conflict without resolving it. Fortunately, after the wife’s death, Guntrip was successful in encouraging Fairbairn to marry a woman he loved (Landis, 115).

His lifelong struggle for self-assertion is best exemplified in Fairbairn’s revolutionary insistence that psychoanalysis prioritize the need of the self for an acknowledging other. The persistence of his own continuing conflict with relationship is poignantly described by Guntrip. At the close of Guntrip’s analysis (over 1,000 sessions), Guntrip writes: “…I suddenly realized in that long period we had never once shaken hands…I put out my hand and at once he took it, and I suddenly saw a few tears trickle down his face. I saw the warm heart of this man with a fine mind and a shy nature” (1975, 149).

The last word is Guntrip’s: “…it seems that our theory must be rooted in our psychopathology…The idea that we could think out a theory of the structure and functioning of the personality without its having any relation to the structure and functioning of our own personality, should be a self-evident impossibility” (1975, 156). So it would seem that contemporary psychoanalytic emphasis on the self’s need to confirm a sense of being through relationship with another is drawn from the personal need of three major analysts to define and resolve a schizoid struggle for relatedness in themselves and others.

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