ABSTRACT
W. R. D. Fairbairn, a distinguished Scottish psychiatrist and scholar, has had a profound yet subtle influence on his fellow psychoanalysts of the English-speaking world. Fairbairn was elected to membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society on the basis of his contributions to psychoanalytic thought and theory. His ideas have stimulated further theory, the formulation of interpretations, the notion of the psychoanalytic situation as an experimental situation, and a greater readiness among psychoanalysts to re-examine and to change their techniques. The book Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, published in 1952, contains all Fairbairn's psychoanalytic papers written before that year apart from the two of 1938. Fairbairn evolved four major theories, which in their original form had some superficial inconsistencies with each other; but he noted these and in reconciling them made useful additions and amplifications to his theories in editing his book.
