ABSTRACT
A major contributor to the de-moralising trend in post-Freudian and post-Kleinian psychoanalysis is Harry Guntrip. Guntrip’s descriptions of the “in-out programme” resulting from the schizoid person’s experience of connection as engulfing and separation as abandonment are vivid and useful up to a point. Guntrip describes three subsequent acute episodes of his “mysterious illness”, each occurring in the face of a loss of a “brother”. Fairbairn’s theory would have predisposed him to see Guntrip’s split internal world as an internalisation of and a reaction to “bad object-relations”. Guntrip claims, “At the deepest level, psychotherapy is replacement therapy, providing for the patient what the mother failed to provide at the beginning of life”. It is ironic that the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of original sin is better preserved in psychological form by the non-religious psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, than by the Christians, W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, and Guntrip.
