ABSTRACT
Born in 1889, William Fairbairn was a contemporary of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, but had little to do with them, spending all of his professional life in Edinburgh. As a young man, Fairbairn was religious and took a degree in philosophy, intending to become a clergyman. However, following military service in the Great War, he opted to become a doctor instead, reading Freud and Jung during his training. He had visited the famous hospital for shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh, where Siegfried Sassoon and others in the First World War had been treated by the psychiatrist, W. H. R. Rivers. As a doctor, Fairbairn was inspired by the influential psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her writings, although he did not agree with her about very much. In turn, Klein thoroughly disapproved of him and believed that Fairbairn had not undergone the appropriate amount of analysis himself before expounding his theories.
