ABSTRACT
Fairbairn is one of the early psychoanalytic critics of Freudian theory and one of the ancestors of the relational movement. Scharff and Birtles note that Fairbairn’s writings “have become an intrinsic, accepted core of the thinking of the independent group of British analysts”. It is easy for a contemporary Freudian or Kleinian analyst to maintain that many of the things that Fairbairn put forth are obvious and that of course one deals with the human being and not a compilation of repressed drives or desires. One can see that Jones, certainly someone near the heart of psychoanalytic currents, saw Fairbairn’s ideas as challenging and perhaps revolutionary. Frustration in terms of being loved or having one’s love accepted “is the greatest trauma that a child can experience”. All psycho-sexual phenomena that become compulsive are a result of the failure of obtaining satisfactory love relationships with “objects in the outer world”.
