ABSTRACT
Ronald Fairbairn's accomplishment of discovering and/or naming the fundamental law of human psychology, that the human being is fundamentally relationship seeking, is even more striking because one simply does not expect there to be great generalisations in psychology. Fairbairn did very good science in the sense of Feynman's definition. He showed that Freud's theory of pleasure seeking was a special case of object relations. Science has become totemic in our society. It is the great legitimator, as in the selling of patent medicines, at present by the advertising agencies hired by Big Pharma. One important consequence is the failure to recognise how fundamental Fairbairn's achievement is the consistent distortion of his views around so-called good and bad objects. In psychology there is one great generalisation, Fairbairn's: the human being is relationship seeking. And human psychopathology follows from the breakdown of human relationships.
