ABSTRACT
This chapter presents W. Fairbairn's account of how the primacy of the need to maintain a satisfactory relationship with the mother, combined with the need to separate from the mother, leads to the development of psychic structures. It shows that how these structures are organised, the purpose they serve, and their effects on later development. Like Sigmund Freud, Fairbairn traces back the preconditions of love to infancy. The infant is initially in a state of primary identification. Fairbairn considers three stages in the process of building a defensive structure to protect the infant from the intolerable threat of trauma: internalisation, splitting, and repression. The Freudian psyche is structured in terms of impersonal instincts and energies. The Oedipal phase, itself inherently ordained, leads to the tripartite psychic structure of ego, id and super-ego. Thus even repression, the most fundamental notion in psychoanalytic theory, is for Fairbairn a defensive construction, arising from the initial frustrating relationship.
