47 eBooks available.
Ronald Fairbairn’s theory of object relations, first published in the 1940s, revolutionized psychoanalysis. Countering Freud’s view that the developmental drive emerged almost solely from within an individual, Fairbairn argued that each person’s fundamental need for relationships organizes development and its vicissitudes. In the ensuing years, frequently without attribution to Fairbairn, object relations theory became central to psychoanalytic thinking and source for modern infant research, relational theory, the study of dissociation and multiple personality, psychoanalytic family therapy, and the technique of psychoanalytic therapy.
Fairbairn’s theory drew on his own wide-ranging experience, unusual for his time, which included degrees both in philosophy and medicine at Edinburgh University, where he later taught philosophy and medical psychology from 1927-1935. His through reading of Freud and his clinical experience with abused children, sexual offenders, and war neuroses as well as neurotic adults, provided the basis for reorienting psychoanalysis to the study of relationships. At the center of Fairbairn’s theory is the concept of dynamic internal relations between the self and its objects that give meaning to experience. Fairbairn though that infants deal with frustration, rejection, and trauma through introjections and splitting of the object. The resulting matrix of dynamic internal relationships, part of every human being’s makeup, profoundly influences behavior and interpersonal interaction in the outer world.
Volume II consists of early unpublished papers and lectures, as well as papers on applied psychoanalysis. These establish Fairbairn’s early scholarship before the development of object relations theory and his understanding of the wide applicability of psychoanalysis to the psychology of art, social issues, education, and primary care.
Ronald Fairbairn’s theory of object relations, first published in the 1940s, revolutionized psychoanalysis. Countering Freud’s view that the developmental drive emerged almost solely from within an individual, Fairbairn argued that each person’s fundamental need for relationships organizes development and its vicissitudes. In the ensuing years, frequently without attribution to Fairbairn, object relations theory became central to psychoanalytic thinking and source for modern infant research, relational theory, the study of dissociation and multiple personality, psychoanalytic family therapy, and the technique of psychoanalytic therapy.
Fairbairn’s theory drew on his own wide-ranging experience, unusual for his time, which included degrees both in philosophy and medicine at Edinburgh University, where he later taught philosophy and medical psychology from 1927-1935. His through reading of Freud and his clinical experience with abused children, sexual offenders, and war neuroses as well as neurotic adults, provided the basis for reorienting psychoanalysis to the study of relationships. At the center of Fairbairn’s theory is the concept of dynamic internal relations between the self and its objects that give meaning to experience. Fairbairn though that infants deal with frustration, rejection, and trauma through introjections and splitting of the object. The resulting matrix of dynamic internal relationships, part of every human being’s makeup, profoundly influences behavior and interpersonal interaction in the outer world.
Volume I of this two-volume set contains Fairbairn’s previously uncollected major papers, which are characterized by flexibility and depth in the application of object relations theory to the clinical situation. The papers of theory and scientific methodology show rigorous logic in the exploration of the scientific underpinnings of psychoanalysis and of the issues posed by the substitution of an object relations view for Freud’s classical theory.
New Paradigms for Treating Relationships is a contemporary international perspective on the theory and practice of analytic couple and family therapy. It summarizes theory, sets it in context, and illustrates the concepts with clinical illustrations. This clearly written and engaging volume is essential for tracking couple and family therapists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and teachers of psychotherapy, as well as students of psychoanalysis and philosophy.
This paper describes The Group Affective Model, a method for teaching psychoanalytic concepts and their clinical application, using multi-channel teaching, process and review in group settings, learning from experience in an open systems learning community for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. This innovation arose in response to criticism of existing methods in psychoanalytic education that have subordinated the primary educational task to that of the training analysis. Noticing this split between education and training analysis, between cognition and affect, and between concepts of individual and group unconscious processes, we developed the Group Affective Model for teaching and learning psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in an open psychological space in which individual and group processes of digestion, assimilation, and internalization are experienced, consensually validated, described and evaluated by students and faculty.
We discuss our beliefs and our educational stance. We describe our institution and our participants. We give examples of teaching situations that we have studied to provide some insight about assimilation and internalization of the concepts and clinical approaches being taught. We discuss the transferability of the Group Affective Model to other teaching settings and psychoanalytic training institutions.
“Scharff shows how sexual union gives us the repeated opportunity to return to the source of our most profound instinctual needs so that we can find there the nourishment for emotional renewal through a harmonious interplay of our internal object relations.… Scharff sees patients with problems in sexually relating as needing help in finding out how to translate the problems into emotional equivalents that are susceptible to therapeutic change. The family group offers the means of working through a second time in adulthood what went wrong the first time in childhood, by continued object seeking, finding, and repairing. it is the unique situation in which transferences can be creatively satisfied.”
– Andrew Powell
This book shows how the therapist’s use of the self, the key ingredient of successful treatment, can be developed into a sensitive instrument for therapy. With firsthand accounts of experiencing affective learning, the Scharff’s take us through their work with clinicians studying dynamic psychotherapy in a group setting. They demonstrate how the group process brings a depth and richness to the clinical material and transforms the therapist’s way of thinking and working with emotional experience. Intellectual understanding and emotional responses to clinical material are integrated and this enhanced learning is brought into clinical practice. The internal object relations of patient and therapist are clarified through the transference; the same awareness occurs as therapists learn together in the affective learning group. This here-and-now examination of object relationships is highly effective and growth enhancing. Relevant to mental health professionals at all levels of expertise, this book is written for therapists invested in their own learning, teaching, and practice. Only by being open to ourselves, the Scharff’s show, can we truly be responsive to our patients.
Describes the relationship between the Tavistock Institute and The International Psychotherapy Institute founded by David E. Scharff and Jill Savege Scharff.
Republished in ebook form with permission from Phoenix Publishing House firingthemind.com
Savege Scharff, Jill & Scharff, David E. (2020). Our relationship to the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology and Tavistock Relationships. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 10, 186–190. doi: 10.33212/cfp.v10n2.2020.186
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.
An introduction to the International Institute of Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT), an experimental psychoanalytic institute that grew out of, and remains embedded within, the International Psychotherapy Institute, including: the historico-political context and factors that led to its formation, relationships to established professional associations, and its organization and functioning in national and international dimensions.
