Download Tag: James Grotstein

Fairbairn, Then and Now

W.R.D. Fairbairn was both a precursor and an architect of revolutionary changes in psychoanalysis. Through a handful of tightly reasoned papers written in the 1940s and 1950s, Fairbairn emerged as an incisive, albeit relatively obscure, voice in the wilderness, at considerable remove from mainstream Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. But in the 1970s Harry Guntrip made Fairbairn’s thinking more accessible to a wide readership, and Fairbairn’s object relations theory, with its innovative theoretical and clinical concepts, was at the center of the turn toward relational thinking that swept psychoanalysis in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fairbairn, Then and Now is a landmark volume, because a thorough grasp of Fairbairn’s contribution is crucial to any understanding of what is taking place within psychoanalysis today. And Fairbairn’s work remains a treasure trove of rich insights into the problems and issues in theory and clinical practice with which analysts and therapists are struggling today.

This is particularly propitious time for renewed focus on Fairbairn’s contribution. A wealth of previously unpublished material has recently emerged, and the implications of Fairbairn’s ideas for current developments in trauma, dissociation, infant research, self theory, field therapy, and couple and family therapy are becoming increasingly clear. The conference that stimulated the contributions to this volume by internationally eminent Fairbairn clinicians and scholars was a historically important event, and Fairbairn, Then and Now makes the intellectual ferment generated  by this event available to all interested readers.

Wilfred R. Bion:An Odyssey Into the Deep and Formless Infinite

Bion’s public language, both in his speeches and writings, closely epitomize his metapsychological beliefs. He eschewed understanding because of his belief that understanding closed off the experience and therefore foreclosed the transformation in O. He often cautioned that one should not try to understand what he said or wrote but rather should be receptive to one’s individual impressions and responses to what he said. “Do not listen to me, but listen to yourself listening to me,” would be a succinct restatement of his view. He thereby clarified a theory of thinking whose rationalistic roots go back to Plato and have coursed through Kant. It embraces a philosophical conception of the human being as the innovator of imaginative conjecture, that intersects with the data of external experience (K) to emerge as thought. He arrived at these ideas about thinking from many years of psychoanalyzing psychotics who could not think. Psychoanalysis had previously concentrated on the treatment of neurotics who could think but would not in selected areas of inhibition. By clarifying that realm of psychotic transformation that is beyond repression and comprises the mutilation of thoughts and thinking, Bion added a whole new domain to our clinical knowledge as well.