Why read Fairbairn?

Giving Back What the Patient Brings: On Winnicott's "Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development"

The author offers a creative reading of Winnicott's (1967) "Mirror-role of mother and family in child development." Winnicott presents the idea that a pivotal experience in the process of the infant's coming into being as himself is the mother's communicating to the infant, by the look in her eyes, what she sees there when she looks at him. In the absence of the experience of being seen, the infant's capacity to feel real and alive atrophies. The author fleshes out Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that just as the infant comes more fully into being as he sees himself in his mother's eyes, so too, the mother comes more fully into being as a mother as she sees herself in the infant's eyes. The paradigm shift that Winnicott has contributed to psychoanalysis is reflected in the clinical work he presents: (1) the goal of psychoanalysis is no longer the enrichment of the patient's self-understanding; rather, the analytic goal is the patient's coming more fully alive to himself; and (2) the analyst helps the patient achieve this end not by making astute interpretations but by allowing the patient to experience the pleasure of making discoveries of his or her own.

Like the belly of a bird breathing: On Winnicott's "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-soma"

In "Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma," Winnicott reinvents the concept of psyche-soma by viewing it as a set of experiences located neither in the body nor in the brain, and in fact, not located anywhere. Psyche, in health, is understood to be the imaginative functioning of mental processes, and soma is understood to be the experience of physical realness and aliveness. Winnicott offers a clinical illustration of work with a patient who feels unreal to herself. He describes a juncture in the analysis in which the patient's somatic functioning is everything, while Winnicott, by feeling his own breathing and watching the patient breathe, knows that she is alive. This is the beginning of her becoming able to experience her breathing (soma) and imagining (psyche) as real, alive, and her own.Among the concepts Winnicott alludes to, and that I develop, are (1) the idea that in his clinical work Winnicott not only lives an experience with the patient, he also brings an unspoken structure of meaning to the experience, and the two are inseparable; and (2) the idea that Winnicott introduces a set of terms and a way of thinking that is independent of the differentiation of conscious and unconscious mind (Freud's topographic model). These ideas include aliveness and deadness, realness and unrealness, being and disruption of being.

The Limit of Intimacy and the Intimacy of Limit: Play and its Relation to the Bad Object

Attachment to the bad object has remained a durable, undertheorized clinical problem. With an extended clinical example, the experience of limit, in both patient and analyst, is examined as part of a dense undercurrent in the relationship, including transference, that gives rise to shifts in understanding the attachment to an unsatisfying internal object. Importantly, the patient's and the analyst's experiences of limit are "in play" during the process of changes in the patient's attachment to the bad object. The relation of patient and analyst to the patient's internal objects, including bad and unsatisfying objects, is where play itself begins. Limit itself is constitutive of play. The analyst's attempt to analyze his own thoughts and experience regarding limits in maintaining an empathic connection to the patient's psychic reality influences the patient's capacity to take in a new part of his or her experience.

The Somatic Symptom as One's Object: Applying Fairbairn's Theory of Internal Object Relations and Winnicott's Conceptualization of the Psyche-and-Soma

The author discusses Winnicott's theory (1949/1975) of the psyche-soma and Fairbairn's (1944) theory of internal object relations, bringing them together to enrich our perspective of one's somatization. By focusing on how the patient takes care, attends, experiences, and feels toward the symptom, the analyst can better understand the patient's early object-relations. This allows analyst and patient to rethink the symptom in terms of the patient's early traumas and one's capacity to mourn the loss of the love-object. Fairbairn's conceptualizations of the "rejecting," "alluring," and "addictive" object-relations are combined with Winnicott's understanding of the split between psyche and soma, following the ill-adaptation of the mother to the baby's earliest emotional needs.

What alive means: On Winnicott's "transitional objects and transitional phenomena"

In his reading of Winnicott's "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena," the author views Winnicott as engaged in offering a way of conceiving of the fundamentally human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations come to feel alive and real to him or her. The author proposes that the concept of paradox captures something of both the idea and the experience of transitional objects and phenomena. The author then looks closely at the new clinical illustration that Winnicott presents in the fourth and final version of his paper. He discusses what he views as Winnicott's most evolved form of clinical practice. The author also takes up Winnicott's idea of "the negative," a state of being in which the gap, the amnesia, the death is all that feels real, while the presence or memory of the object feels unreal. The author offers an illustration of clinical work in which a significant alteration of the analytic frame provides a context in which the patient is able to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.

Has Oedipus Murdered His Parents? Distinguishing Between "Killing" and "Murdering" One's Parent as Promoting Psychic Growth Versus Melancholia

Most analysts who write about the Oedipus complex, including Loewald and Ogden, do not seem to differentiate between the oedipal "killing" as opposed to murdering one's parent. Life, and especially growing up, entail more than one act of "killing," on both the child's and the parents' sides. If there is a benign resolution to the oedipal conflict, then this is a "soft" killing, which acts on behalf of life, or at least can be experienced as an inevitable part of it. Under less favorable circumstances, such as excessive deprivation, oedipal parricide amounts to a murderous act against one's parent, which will not result in psychic growth, but in melancholia and other psychic disturbances. This difference will be discussed in light of Loewald's and Ogden's reconceptualization of the Oedipus complex and Fairbairn's conception of the basic trauma of the infant/child, in relation to the mother's rejection of his or her love.

On Reverie and Independence

The author presents a detailed clinical discussion of his work with a forty-year-old man and a ten-year-old boy in which he focuses on loss of self-object differentiation in the transference-countertransference experiences while he and these two patients were working with tyrannical internal objects (arising from in-tergenerationally transmitted trauma). In both of the analytic psychotherapies, the author experiences reveries in which a benevolent paternal figure lovingly supports a child's quest for independence. These reveries are of help to the therapist in recognizing, acknowledging, and accepting the need on the part of both patients to emancipate themselves from unconscious tyrannizing internal objects. The patients had previously experienced their need for emancipation as destructive to their parents and themselves, and consequently too dangerous to attempt.

A Fairbairnian structural analysis of the narcissistic personality disorder

Fairbairn's structural theory is based on the developing child's need to dissociate actual events between himself or herself and his or her objects that are excessively rejecting in order to contine an uninterrupted, pristine attachment to them. This eventuates in three selves in relation to three objects: One pair is conscious (the central ego which relates to the ideal object), while the other two pairs (the antilibidinal ego, which relates to the rejecting object, and the libidinal ego, which relates to the exciting object) are mostly held in the unconscious. Fairbairn saw the fluid relationship between the two split-off pairs of unconscious part selves and the conscious central ego as the primary dynamic of the human personality. The author proposes a specific variation in Fairbairn's structural theory to account for the development of narcissism. Specifically, this disorder is viewed as the result of a developmental history in which the child finds himself or herself in an exceedingly hostile interpersonal environment that precludes the child from using an idealized version either of his or her parental objects as the "exciting object." The child therefore substitutes a grandiose view of himself or herself as the exciting object. This defense deflects external influences and replaces relationships with external objects with a closed internal world that is comprised of an admiring part-self basking in reflected love from its relationship with an exciting part-object.

Pathological narcissism and the obstruction of love

Pathological narcissism is a form of maladaptive self-regulation that impedes the capacity to love. Although narcissism is often construed as excessive self-love, individuals with pathological narcissism are impaired in being able to love themselves as well as others. With the subject of impaired love in mind, we review selected conceptualizations from an enormous and diverse psychodynamic literature on narcissism. Major theoretical approaches illustrate a number of psychodynamics associated with narcissistic self-regulatory problems. This paper provides a concise overview of major conceptual themes regarding pathological narcissism and impaired capacity to love.