68 Facts About Ronald Fairbairn

William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn FRSE was a Scottish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and a central figure in the development of the Object Relations Theory of psychoanalysis.

Ronald Fairbairn was born at the Red House, Cluny Gardens, in Morningside, Edinburgh in 1889, the only child of Cecilia Leefe and Thomas Fairbairn, a chartered surveyor, and president of the Edinburgh Architectural Association.

Ronald Fairbairn was educated at Merchiston Castle School and at the University of Edinburgh where he studied for three years in divinity and Hellenic Greek studies, graduating MA in 1911.

Ronald Fairbairn received a doctorate in Medicine on 30 March 1929 from the University of Edinburgh.

Ronald Fairbairn's proposers were James Drever, Edwin Bramwell, Sir Godfrey Hilton Thomson and Robert Alexander Fleming.

Ronald Fairbairn was one of the theory-builders for the Middle Group psychoanalysts.

Ronald Fairbairn died in Edinburgh at the age of 75.

Ronald Fairbairn is buried with his wives in Dean Cemetery in western Edinburgh.

In 1926 Ronald Fairbairn married Mary Ann More-Gordon, the daughter of Harry More-Gordon.

Ronald Fairbairn produced only one book length collection of his papers called Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality published in the United States as An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality by Basic Books in 1954.

Ronald Fairbairn's model offers a different theory of psychological development, a completely new vision of the structure and dynamics of the personality, a different source of the origins of psychopathology, and finally, a different approach to the treatment of disordered individuals.

Ronald Fairbairn defined the schizoid as having the three following characteristics:.

Ronald Fairbairn recognized that lack of love in a young child's life is traumatic and disruptive to his attachment.

Ronald Fairbairn thought about, and wrote about the issue of the child's dependency on his mother in each of his four early papers as he was expanding his observations while creating a coherent model.

Ronald Fairbairn observed that the unloved child feels his love is destructive because his parents do not value or accept it, and because they do not return his love.

Ronald Fairbairn was forced to use the preexisting language of psychoanalysis, so he took the word "libido" and changed it to mean a child's love for his parents or love of other external objects.

Ronald Fairbairn becomes afraid to love: and therefore he erects barriers between his objects and himself.

Ronald Fairbairn tends to both keep his objects at a distance and to make himself remote from them.

Ronald Fairbairn rejects his objects: and at the same time he withdraws libido from them.

Ronald Fairbairn gives up on human relationships, focusing instead on his inner world with its fantasies and dreams of success.

Ronald Fairbairn was gradually forming his model in these first papers.

All of psychoanalysis was Freudian in the 1940s, there were no other options, and yet Ronald Fairbairn asked his colleagues to choose between his model and Freud's.

Ronald Fairbairn proposed an outline of a developmental model in his 1941 paper as well.

Ronald Fairbairn noted that human development was characterized by a gradual differentiation from the parent because of the emergence of a constantly maturing, reality oriented "central ego" in the young adult.

Ronald Fairbairn noted this in one of his most famous quotes:.

Ronald Fairbairn discussed the difficulties in separating from unloving parents in this 1941 paper.

Ronald Fairbairn recognized that the lack of early support left the child with very few emotional resources to sustain himself when he left home and faced the world alone.

Later on, in the same paper, Ronald Fairbairn added another comment that further alienated his analytic colleagues:.

Ronald Fairbairn saw that all children sought out good objects, in the hope of establishing a loving relationship with another human being.

Ronald Fairbairn dismissed Freud's notion of an unconscious populated by biological forces that were seen to be the fundamental motivator of humankind.

Also note that Ronald Fairbairn uses the word repressed rather than dissociated in this quote.

Ronald Fairbairn noticed that children who had been removed from their families because of extreme neglect or abuse made endless excuses for their parents and assumed that they themselves were responsible for the treatment that they were receiving.

Ronald Fairbairn never went back to his earlier concepts, like the moral defense, and updated them to fit in with his evolving thought.

Ronald Fairbairn made this revolutionary observation and, at the time, it went unnoticed.

Ronald Fairbairn then took up new topics in the same wide-ranging paper- which is one of his two greatest.

Ronald Fairbairn identifies one of the key mutative factors in psychotherapy as the "good relationship" between the therapist and patient.

Ronald Fairbairn sees the relationship between patient and therapist as providing the patient with enough confidence and support to allow him to "remember" what actually happened to him, as he has a new object upon whom he can depend.

Ronald Fairbairn uses the word "libidinal cathexis" in his quote which is a holdover from the Freudian model.

The 1943 paper's title "Repression and the Return of Bad Objects" suggests that Ronald Fairbairn was going to address the reemergence of bad objects, which he does in his observation regarding one of the fundamental sources of Resistance.

Ronald Fairbairn was both a philosopher and an advanced divinity student before becoming a physician and psychoanalyst, and often his language involves devils and angels, as it does in this quote.

Ronald Fairbairn, as mentioned, was continually amplifying and refining his observations regarding children's dependency on their parents.

Ronald Fairbairn gained his many insights to the plight of children from his work in the orphanage attached to the hospital in Edinburgh in which he worked, and he never forgot those experiences.

Ronald Fairbairn saw psychopathology as an endless series of shifting ego states which were originally designed to protect the individual from the harsh realities of their childhood, but in adulthood they disrupt the individual because of the incomplete views of themselves and the incomplete views of people around them.

Ronald Fairbairn observed that the patient had separate views of herself and of her significant others that could be understood as part-selves and part objects.

Ronald Fairbairn saw that there were three pairs of structures- one pair was conscious and the other two pairs were largely unconscious.

The attachments of these two mostly unconscious selves to these part objects constitutes what Ronald Fairbairn defined as an attachment to the Bad Object.

Ronald Fairbairn described this shift in ego states in the earlier quote that addressed the fact that one ego state could repress another ego state, resulting in a person who experiences the world through a "multiplicity of egos".

The reality that Ronald Fairbairn's structural theory contains six different structures is a source of difficulty in terms of its adoption by the analytic community, as it is more complex than Freud's three structure theory.

Ronald Fairbairn's model is one of relationships in which there are constant dialogues between the structures.

Once again, Ronald Fairbairn's model is consistent and logical in that the original source of psychopathology is the internalization of bad objects.

Ronald Fairbairn's model assumes that actual events in the external world are internalized and summate in both the conscious central ego and in the unconscious structures as well.

Ronald Fairbairn focused on treatment in this 1958 paper that was published six years after his 1952 book of collected papers.

Ronald Fairbairn was extremely courageous intellectually as he had directly challenged the highly regarded creator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

Ronald Fairbairn had taken on the entire world of psychoanalysis and presented an alternative reality, one that was simply too different to be accepted.

Later in the article Ronald Fairbairn described his belief that the relationship between the patient and analyst was the most important factor in provoking change, in contrast to Freud, who thought that interpretation, specifically, interpretation of the transference, was the key to change.

Ronald Fairbairn cites his position that people-specifically the parents of the patient- caused their child to experience frustrations that were dissociated into the child's inner world, and that the relationship with the analyst could help correct the distortions that the patient brings into the consulting room, as the following two quotes demonstrate.

Ronald Fairbairn logically assumed that mental health was based on the process of therapy being able to re-join the split off sub-egos into the central ego.

Ronald Fairbairn's model is consistent as the treatment goals are reversals of the origins of psychopathology.

The second issue that Ronald Fairbairn cited is far more difficult to handle.

Ronald Fairbairn recognized that the patients hate of his needed mother had to be lessened if the antilibidinal ego was to give up its fight with the rejecting object.

Ronald Fairbairn was acutely aware of this as the following two quotes, clearly indicate.

Ronald Fairbairn's model uses the relational patterns embedded in the relationships between the inner structures, when they are expressed interpersonally, to understand the different disorders.

Ronald Fairbairn's model predicts that the mother will be split into rejecting object with a deeply repressed exciting components.

Ronald Fairbairn now appears to be identical to her father, and her antilibidinal ego emerges and it is ready to do battle with the rejecting object.

Ronald Fairbairn looks up to this exciting part of himself through the eyes of his libidinal ego who is an admirer of the grandiose self.

Ronald Fairbairn fully recognized in his declining years that his model had been effectively shut out of mainstream psychoanalysis.

Ronald Fairbairn appears to have wanted to leave the legacy of his model in one last short paper which was published in 1963, in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the premier journal of psychoanalysis.

Ronald Fairbairn never knew, or perhaps even speculated, how important his model would be 50 years after his death.