ABSTRACT

W. F. D. Fairbairn's practical and theoretical interest in sexual perversion, in particular male homosexuality, has surprisingly received almost no attention amid otherwise comprehensive discussion of his ideas. The principal aim of Fairbairn's notes seems to have been to understand his own conflicted sexuality, especially as it related to his worsening urinary phobia. This chapter outlines the evolution of Fairbairn's thinking on homosexuality, of interest in part because it forced him to confront the intersection of biology with his theoretical approach, based on early object relations rather than on libidinal drive theory as the major determinants of psychological development. It examines the ways in which Fairbairn's personal conflicts may have affected his ideas about sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. Fairbairn himself always acknowledged that the psychoanalyst was ultimately motivated by a desire, "largely unconscious perhaps, to resolve his own conflicts". "Horror of the primal scene itself" becomes the key element in Fairbairn's theory of homosexuality.