ABSTRACT

Fairbairn's basic contribution is summarised in the 1996 paper by Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles, which also gives the historical context of his core ideas. It is often unnoticed that Fairbairn's categories of acceptable and rejected internal object relations overlap considerably with the attachment schema. His category of the rejecting/persecuting internal object tied to the anti-libidinal ego or internal saboteur is virtually the same as the relationship in many insecure external attachments. Fairbairn saw that the child's mind was formed by the introjection of an image of the object that derived from external interaction, and that then the individual mind modified what had been taken in. Fairbairn's endopsychic structure remains, the most rigorous model of mind that we have available. Fairbairn's original model both of the mind and of the original introjection of a primary, unsplit object. His idea of progressive re-integration as the goal of maturation is a bit limited.