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William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn (11 August 1889, Edinburgh – 31 December 1964, Edinburgh) was a Scottish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and a central figure in the development of the object relations theory of psychoanalysis.
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He was born in Edinburgh in 1889. Fairbairn was educated at Merchiston Castle School and at Edinburgh University where he studied for three years in Divinity and Hellenic Greek studies. He served with General Allenby in the Palestinian campaign, and when he returned he undertook medical training. He also taught psychology and practiced analysis.
On the basis of his writings he became an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1931, becoming a full member in 1939. Fairbairn, though somewhat isolated in that he spent his entire career in Edinburgh[1] had a profound influence on British object relations and the relational schools. Fairbairn was one of the theory-builders for the Middle Group[2] (now called the Independent Group) psychoanalysts. The Independent Group contained analysts who identified with neither the Kleinians nor the Anna Freudians. They were more concerned with the relationships between people than with the “drives” within them.
Fairbairn was the father of Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, QC (24 December 1933 – 19 February 1995), a British politician.
Fairbairn's works include: Psychoanalytical Studies of the Personality (1952) and From Instinct to Self: Selected Papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn (1994). There is also a biography by John Sutherland, Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior (1989), a study of his work by James Grotstein and R. B. Rinsley, Fairbairn and the Origins of Object Relations (1994), and an edited study by Neil J. Skolnik and David E. Scharff, Fairbairn Then and Now (1998).
Psychoanalytical Studies of Personality (1952) is a collection of papers previously published in different reviews. The book is divided into three parts, the first being mostly theoric, the second one clinical, and the third one concerning more generale problems. The most interesting part is the first one, and the first four articles contain the largest body of the most innovative Fairbairn concepts. The table of contents entails:
One of the most important contributions of Fairbairn to the psychoanalytic paradigm is proposing an alternative viewpoint regarding the libido. Whereas Freud assumed that the libido is pleasure seeking, Fairbairn thought of the libido as object seeking.[3] That is, he thought that the libido is not primarily aimed at pleasure, but at making relationships with others. The first connections a child makes are with his parents. Through diverse forms of contact between the child and his parents, a bond between them is formed. When the bond is formed, the child becomes strongly attached to his parents. This early relationship shapes the emotional life of the child in such a strong way that it determines the emotional experiences that the child will have later on in life, because the early libidinal objects become the prototypes for all later experience of connection with others.
Fairbairn states that the object relations a child has very early on in life become the child’s prototypes for all later experiences regarding connections with others. The internal object relation describes a relation which exists in the person's mind. In the normal situation, healthy parenting results in a child with an outward orientation towards real people, who can give real contact and exchange. When the needs of the child are not met by the parents (e.g. dependency needs and the need for affirmative interactions) a pathological turning away from external reality takes place. Instead of actual exchange with others, fantasied, private presences are established, the so-called internal objects. To these internal objects the child relates in fantasied connections, the internal object relations.
Fairbairn envisioned the child with largely unavailable parents as differentiating between the responsive aspects of the parents (the good object) and the unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object). The child internalizes the unresponsive aspects of the parents and fantasizes those features as being a part of him, because they are not available in reality. This defense mechanism is known as "splitting of the ego", where the good and the bad parts of the parents are kept apart, and where there is no possibility to feel ambivalence. For example, when a mother is depressed and denies this, the child is unable to connect completely to his mother. Therefore, the child identifies itself with this denied part of the parent, and becomes depressed itself.