Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality

Published in 1952, this volume collects the papers in which Fairbairn set out his revision of psychoanalytic theory. Working from clinical material on schizoid and depressive states, he argued that libido is object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking: the infant reaches for a relationship, and pleasure is the signpost to the object, not the aim. From that premise Fairbairn rebuilt the model of mind. He described an endopsychic structure in which the pristine ego splits under the strain of unsatisfying relationships into a central ego, a libidinal ego tied to the exciting object, and an internal saboteur, or anti-libidinal ego, bound to the rejecting one. He set out the schizoid position as the basic developmental difficulty and the moral defence by which the child preserves the goodness of caregivers by taking their badness inward. For the clinician, the papers supply a structural language for internal object relations, transference, and the tenacity of bad-object ties.