As an introduction to this lecture I would like to pick out the word ‘critique’ from my title and say something about two related ideas. They are both very useful if we are to understand Fairbairn’s mind.
In lecture 1 I made reference to Fairbairn’s background in philosophy. Firstly I would like to speak about the notion of judgement as it occurs within philosophy or more particularly with epistemology. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that is concerned with the acquisition of knowledge - how we arrive at knowing something. This process begins with observation, experience, sensing. We move to ask questions which usually lead to other questions. We explore, we intuit, we inquire. We look for coherence, we have hunches, we look for causes, we risk a hypothesis, we test, we invite the examination of others, we arrive at a theory, at a piece of truth. We judge something to be. We make a judgement
Judgement in this sense does not have a moralistic connotation. It does however have a morality - it is a morality of what is TRUE. Moralising leads to rigidity. Morality leads to robustness.
Fairbairn is one of the few people in psychoanalysis who rise above criticism as a squabbling between different points of view. He would agree with William Hazlitt who said (1821) ‘To have a disinterested regard to truth, the mind must have contemplated it in abstract and remote questions’. Matthew Arnold in speaking of criticism and curiosity spoke of “a disinterested love of a free play of mind on all subjects”.
In 1865 Arnold praised Edmund Burke for his capacity to take up a position that opposes his own. Burke, having written about the French revolution and argued strenuously against it, completes his writing by taking up the arguments in favour of it. Arnold calls this ‘returning upon himself’. To quote him:
‘That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas, when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all round you no language but your own, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other, still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, I know of nothing more striking.
All this is important if we are to appreciate the spirit in which Fairbairn entered into any debate. He is not interested in one-up-man-ship. The truth stands alone.
Critique of Libido theory
Fairbairn considered the libido theory of Freud and elaborated upon by Abraham with its oral, anal and phallic phases and suggests that they are rather introverted ways of conceiving of development. A person can only be properly thought of, particularly in relation to development in terms of his constant interaction with his environment. The theory of libido and the whole notion of instinct/drives upon which it is based, only considers one side. Fairbairn says why not think of a breast phase, a faeces phase, a genital phase? This would create a truly object relations theory. He says that the concept of erotogenic zones with the object as the means of providing libidinal pleasure was to ‘put the cart before the horse’. He believed that the erotogenic zone is simply to be regarded as the path of least resistance to the object. He believed that Abraham’s scheme made Freud’s more one sided with each phase of development related to a libidinal aim. Abraham did advance from Freud’s one person, one body psychology. His was an object relations theory but he did not spell it out fully enough.
But one of the issues with which Fairbairn takes issue is that for Abraham the internalising of objects developmentally is not a primary but a secondary activity. If we go to Abraham’s famous paper on the libido we see in his scheme of things that he regards the first stage of life as being without object.
Fairbairn believed that the infant in object seeking from the beginning. He poses the question - Why does the infant such its thumb? Is it because the mouth is an erotogenic zone and pleasure is the aim. In his scheme the answer is - because the thumb is a substitute for the nipple/breast. The thumb sucking is a technique for dealing with the absence of the breast, or as a way of dealing with an unsatisfactory object relationship. Pleasure provides a sign post to the object. Auto erotic psycho sexuality constitutes a default or failure in the mother/infant relationship. ‘Auto-eroticism is a technique whereby the person seeks not only to provide for himself what he can’t get from the object, but also to provide himself an object he cannot obtain.’ (p.34)
The two anal and phallic phases of Abraham largely represent attitudes based upon this technique. The technique always retains the impress of its oral origin, and so is intimately connected with incorporation of the object, and thereby with a relationship with an internalised object.
Also the two anal and the phallic phase in Abraham’s scheme have no place as developmental phases in Fairbairn’s way of thinking.
So in rearranging the cart and the horse Fairbairn says:
The real point about the mature individual is not that the libidinal attitude is essentially genital, but that the genital attitude is essentially libidinal.
and in a way to repeat that,
It is not in virtue of the fact that the genital level has been reached that object relationships are satisfactory. On the contrary it is in virtue of the fact that satisfactory object relations have been established that true genital sexuality has been attained.
Paranoia, phobia, obsession and hysteria are various techniques of defending the self against the effects of conflicts arising out of unsatisfactory object relationships. They are not products of fixations at specific libidinal phases.
Development for Fairbairn has 3 stages:
A. Infantile Dependency.
B. Transition (or Quasi Independent stage)
C. Mature Dependency.
Infantile dependency is characterised not only by identification by also by the oral attitude of incorporation. In virtue of this fact the object with which the individual is identified becomes equivalent to an incorporated object, or, to put it in a more arresting fashion, the object in which the individual is incorporated is incorporated in the individual.' (Fairbairn 1952 p.42.)
In dreams this can be shown by the situation of being inside something and having the same thing inside you.
In stage A Dependency is total, physical and psychological. One person is all important. The infants objects constitute not only his world but also himself.
Early oral conflict is between to love or not to love. Here is the origins of the schizoid state. If things go wrong his love is not accepted and he is not allowed to love. He will believe that his love is bad. He will lose the wish to express himself. Futility sets in.
So the ego is weak…impotent…incapable of expressing itself…its very existence becomes compromised. The end of the line is a fear of the loss of the ego itself…madness and disaster.
I take this opportunity to record my conception of the essential difference between a psychoneurosis and a psychosis. The distinction in question has been the subject of much debate; but in my opinion it is quite simple, viz. to the effect that , whereas the psychoneurotic tends to treat situations in outer reality as if they were situation sin inner reality (i.e. in terms of transference), the psychotic tends to treat situations in inner reality as if they were situations in outer reality.(Scharff, D. & Fairbairn Birtles, E. 1994 Vol. 1.page 85)
Fairbairn replaces Freud’s and Abraham’s scheme. He places the onset of schizophrenia and Manic Depression in Stage A.
Mature Dependency is a stage when relationships occur with separate differentiated objects, or between two people who are separate objects.
Transition
Fairbairn places the 4 main groups of psychological problems as having their origin in this stage. The four are:
- Paranoia
- Obsession
- Hysteria
- Phobia
Some general statements, some general characteristics of this stage.
- In the absence of assurance...of love…the person’s relationships to his objects are fraught with too much anxiety over separation to enable him to renounce the attitude of infantile dependency; for such a renunciation would be the equivalent in his eyes to forfeiting all hope of ever obtaining the satisfaction of his unsatisfied emotional needs. (Fairbairn 1952 p. 39.
- Each in their own way relate back to the early stage A. (Infantile Dependent/Oral).
- Each attempt to deal with an earlier problem.
- Each are techniques to protect against a catastrophe of the self, and are therefore defensive in nature.
- It is not a sense of one thing being overlaid upon the other earlier situation. There is a new attempt to deal with the earlier issue and so the sense is of a dynamic interplay with the earlier. So overtly the action may be moved to a new scene but the essential elements are still the same as of old.
- As the ‘accepted object’ and the ‘rejected object’ are internalised objects the child is dealing with a state of affairs within himself, or more radically with a state of affairs that is himself.
Fairbairn on Freud’s interpretation of Schreber’s Illness and Freud’s theory of Paranoia
I want to now turn to the Schreber case. This will allow me to further pursue Fairbairn’s critique of Freud’s and Abraham.
The republication of Schreber’s Memoirs in 1955 and further research carried out and published by Niederland in 1963 provide a lot of information which Freud did not have available. Freud however had acknowledged the paucity of information on Schreber’s early life and referred to ‘the shadowy sketch of infantile material’ in his memoirs. It was the 1955 republication of Schreber’s Memoirs that prompted Fairbairn to write his 1956 paper called ‘The Schreber case’.
Schreber’s father died in 1861. In 1851 during his daily exercises a ladder fell on his head and he spent the final 10 years of his life in declining health, experiencing chronic headaches and ‘hallucinations with a pathological urge to murder’.
He left a wife, 2 sons and 3 daughters. The oldest son Daniel Gustav became a lawyer. He became a judge in 1877.A few weeks later at the age of 38 he shot himself.
A year after his brother shot himself Daniel Paul Schreber our patient at age 35 married a 21 year old childish woman.They had 6 full term still births and no live child.
In Oct 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber contested an election for the German Parliament (Reichstag) and stood as a political candidate for the National Liberal party in opposition to Bismark’s autocratic and reactionary regime. He suffered a crushing defeat (14,512 to 5,762).
In Dec 1884 he was admitted to the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Leipzig, where he remained for 6 months. He was in a very unstable state of mind, convinced he was becoming emaciated. He had difficulties in walking and talking and made two suicide attempts.
He was then out of hospital for 8 years. In 1894 shortly after being appointed to a high legal position he had a second breakdown was readmitted to the clinic where he remained till 1902. He suffered from delusions and thought he would be the only one in the new world which he would return to a state of bliss by becoming a woman.
It was of this period that he wrote his famous memoirs. His third hospitalisation was in 1907 and he died in the asylum of Leipzig in 1911.
Fairbairn, speaking of Freud’s interpretation of Schreber’s illness says that Freud believed the cause of illness was ‘an outburst of homosexual libido’ which became attached to Flechsig, (Schreber’s doctor when he was in the asylum) and that his struggles against the libidinal impulse ‘produced the conflict which gave rise to the pathological phenomena’. Why did it happen then? Because ‘every human being oscillates all through life between heterosexual and homosexual feelings’, and ‘any frustration or disappointment in the one direction is apt to drive him over into the other’. Schreber’s attitude to Flechsig was the transference of a passive homosexual wish phantasy from his father; this being unacceptable to the ego was dealt with by turning the loved one into a persecutor. As time went on God takes the place of Flechig. This substitution was an attempt at a resolution. To be Flechsig’s prostitute was unacceptable. To be God’s sexual play thing had an aim. Emasculation ceased to be a disgrace and became ‘consonant with the order of things’ since it would lead to the renewal of the human race after its extinction and thereafter to Schreber’s name being revered. His ego thus found compensation in his megalomania, while his feminine wish phantasy became acceptable. The conflict which he sought to resolve in his delusional system was basically an infantile conflict with his father, who interfered with his auto-erotic gratifications. So Freud saw the delusional system as a triumph of his infantile sexuality. He dealt with the anxiety of castration by becoming a woman. His childless marriage was significant because he had no son to console him for the loss of his father and to provide him with an object for his unsatisfied homosexual affections.
In Freud’s theory of paranoia the reason he gives for a fixation at the point of moving from a narcissistic to an allo-erotic stage of libidinal development, is either,
- an unusual stimulation of libido, or
- frustration in heterosexual or social relations.
The libido which can’t find its way outwards is withdrawn onto the ego. This ‘libidinal cathexis of the ego’ gives rise to grandiosity. Projection with delusional formation is employed to counteract, fill the gap left between self and other. Freud explains paranoia and schizophrenia as having this detached libido withdrawn onto the ego. He sees the latter as being an earlier problem.
You will see from what has already been said about Fairbairn’s scheme that he will take issue with Freud’s explanations. Fairbairn points to the inconsistency in Freud when he superimposes and ego psychology on top of an impulse psychology. He also criticises Abraham’s scheme, that despite having that advance available to him Abraham continued to employ an abstract concept of libido, rather than a psychology of the ego and its object relations. Fairbairn's general approach is indicated by his reference to Freud’s notion of everyone oscillating between homo and hetero sexual feelings. He writes,
[Such] observations can hardly be regarded as satisfactory, since they take little account of the mental factors, which from a psychological standpoint, must be assumed to determine such a presumptive oscillation. There would appear to be ample evidence that, apart from the narcissistic factor involved, the homosexual object choice is determined by a rejection of the heterosexual parent; and even the narcissistic factor may be interpreted as due, not to any fixation at a presumptive narcissistic stage of development, but to a withdrawal of libidinal interest from the heterosexual parent as a bad object in the outer world and a defensive resort to auto eroticism mediated by masturbation.
So Fairbairn is asking questions about:
- the mental factor
- a psychological standpoint.
He is asking where are the significant relationship’s in a person’s life, in effect asking where is the father and the mother? You will already be familiar with these questions from your reading of the paper and the case examples he provides.
Fairbairn notes that Freud makes no mention at all of Schreber‘s mother. In fact Freud knew nothing of Schreber‘s mother. He did not even know that she was alive through all the writing of the Memoirs.
We need to know more about Schreber’s life. This will allow us to not only see the issues which were important to Fairbairn in his understanding of the origins of psychopathology including the psychoses but as I have indicated will allow us to see more clearly the ways in which he differed from Freud and Abraham.
Schreber’s memoirs are a unique account of a mental illness in that they are the notes written by the person himself. They also include reports by the 3 people in whose care he was when in mental hospital. He had some trouble getting them published but despite obstacles did succeed to get his book into print but it only went to one edition and not everyone was pleased with the result, his family buying as many copies as they could find and destroying them.
As there is more direct information available about him I shall begin with Schreber’s father. I have told you about his death now I will tell you about his life. Daniel Paul Schreber’s father was Daniel Moritz Schreber. He was a famous physician, orthopaedist and pedagogue and most widely known for his books on gymnastics. His books were among the best sellers in the 19th century. His best seller called Medical Indoor Gymnastics by 1909 had reached its 32nd edition having sold 205,000 copies. However he was not just one of the fathers of modern German gymnastics but he was also a reformer filled with a missionary zeal. He had interests beyond the physical well being of people. The preface of one of his books reads like this,
We salute German gymnastics as a sign of the revivification of the robust German popular spirit in a perfected and ennobled form corresponding to the level of general cultural development’…For centuries the vital German popular spirit wrestled in silent, open battle with the dark powers of medieval popery and jesuitism…it took many many years before the still glorious embers of the German popular spirit, mired deep in the ruins and ashes left behind, could again burst forth in individual flames. Praise be to God! Gymnastics is no passing fashion, but the young and ennobled instinct of the old but still healthy root of Germanic national life.
If we look at some the titles of his other book, Detrimental Carriage and Habits of the Child’. ‘Rearing unto Beauty through the Natural and Uniform Promotion of Normal Bodily Movement’. ‘The Family Friend as Educator and Conductor to Domestic Happiness, to Popular Health and to the Refinement of Man, for the Fathers and Mothers of the German People’.
The family friend is of course Mr Schreber himself and his books. Moritz Schreber believed that gymnastics as taught by others was too lax. “What we need is a system”. He believed that moral improvement is inseparable from the body’s condition. ‘God resides in your body and that temple at all times must be spared desecration’. In children he strove to separate what he called the ‘noble’ from the ‘base spores’.
The important question that we are asking is what sort of father was he to his children, what type of family life did Daniel Paul Schreber have as a child? What sort of emotional environment was he brought up in? Who was his mother and where was she in his upbringing?
Let us just pose those questions and now have a look for some answers.
When Moritz Schreber gets to write of child rearing he answers our questions.
First of all with regard to the first year of life he says:The child should be placed on the lap of his mother or nanny; he should then eat or drink whatever he wished. No matter how much the child might beg or cry, he was to be fed nothing until his regular mealtime. He was then and there to learn the ‘art of renouncing’ while being held gently but firmly on his mother’s lap.
The tempers of the small child, making themselves known by the child’s screaming and crying for no apparent reason,…expressing nothing more than whim, the first emergence of obstinacy,…must be confronted in a positive manner…by quickly diverting the child’s attention, through stern admonitions. Crying and whimpering without reason express nothing but a whim, a mood, and the first emergence of stubbornness; they must be dealt with through serious words, but if all else fails…by repeated physically perceptible admonitions…In this way - and only in this way- the child becomes conscious of its dependence on the external world and learns…submission…this kind of procedure is necessary but once. Or at most twice - and one will have become master of the child forever.
And again
... one must see to it that children always sit straight and on both buttocks simultaneously…neither first on the right nor on the left side..it is important to train children of this age [from 2 to 7] to acquire absolutely straight posture..they should be forced to hold themselves upright and erect.
Moritz Schreber did not just stop at admonishing and beating his children. He needed as he said a system, and he developed devices to assist him in his becoming master of the child forever. He designed and built chairs in which children were strapped in to make them sit up straight. He developed straps by which the child would be bound to its bed to keep it in the same position.
With regard to a child’s sexual development his father’s views are of interest.
One must be incessantly vigilant against this insidious plague of youth, masturbation. It makes the youth stupid and dumb, fed up with life, overly disposed to illness, vulnerable to countless diseases of the lower abdomen and to diseases of the nervous system, and very soon makes them impotent and sterile.
Moritz Schreber was always lecturing his children on the human body, elaborating especially on the phenomenon of magnetic attraction and repulsion which he saw as the expression of basic cosmic forces governing the universe. All these elements are in his son’s delusional system. He would take his children on walks lecturing them on the wonders of the world. When they got home he would question, in fact interrogate them wanting to hear in minute detail what he had taught them.
Doctor Schreber also forbade any contact with animals saying it tempted children to commit acts of sadistic cruelty.
Schreber’s mother
We still need to follow up our question about Schreber’s mother. Is it not an extraordinary thing that Freud completely ignores Schreber’s mother? He makes no mention of her in his paper. Freud is not alone in this neglect. Most commentators on the case threat Schreber as motherless. Fairbairn’s 1956 paper is the first to draw attention to her.
If we turn to a letter written in 1909 two years before the death of Daniel Paul Schreber by his eldest sister Anna we find the following remarks about their parents.
‘Father discussed with our mother everything and anything; she took part in all his ideas, plans and projects, she read the galley proofs of his writings with him, and was his faithful, close companion in everything’.
William Niederland who has done most of the research on Schreber’s background in reflecting on this says the following.
The mother [helped and actively participated in those partly coercive, partly seductive procedures.”] and must have thus become, from [Daniel Paul’s ] point of view, the willing and active participant in the paternal practices, manipulations, and coercive procedures performed on the patient. It thus becomes likely that the peculiar complexities of Schreber’s God, the central figure of the Memoirs, with its division into anterior and ‘posterior’ ‘forecourts’, upper and lower deities, and various other attributes, represent the condensed archaically distorted fusion of both parental images in the son’s delusional system. God in this system would be the delusional composite of both father and mother, both projected and later regained as objects through the restitution attempts via the delusional fantasies about miracles and other ‘divine’ manoeuvres enacted on the patient’s body’. (Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 1963. P. 203/4)
Discussion of Schreber, Psychoses, Freud, Abraham and Fairbairn
So in the light of new evidence is the case to be reopened? What would be your diagnosis of the patient now particularly of the origins of his states of mind? Politicians decide whether to reopen cases or not. For the scientist there is no decision to be made. The case must be reopened and re-examined. At least that is how things should be. Fairbairn would be the first to agree. Unfortunately this is not, and has not always been the case in psychoanalysis. The attachment to ones favourite theory and to the people or person who espouse it can blind the mind. If we do not have the answers perhaps at least we need to be brave enough to ask the questions.
What do you think would be Schreber’s first experience of life as an infant, born into the presence of his mother and father? In the light of the evidence of how he was later treated, and I am here speaking of the mother and father as a unit, what sense of his own person and his own body was conveyed to him? If the mother and father are a unit then at the very beginning of life the father is important because he is watching over the mother and child. In this as in any intimate human interaction it is not just what people do - it is the feelings and fantasies that accompany the doing. What reflections did he receive back from his parents’ eyes and face and actions? Did he ever exist as a person in his own right? Was he ever loved for himself? Was he ever able to love? Do you think there is any evidence of the existence of spontaneous and genuine expressions of affection
Where do we stand in our consideration of Joan Riviere’s ideas about development?
Unconscious fantasies are formed to some extent after real people but not to a material extent on real experience . Every day we see how little these fantasies tally with what parents really were and really did. Psychoanalysis is Freud’s discovery of what goes on in the imagination but it has no concern with anything else. It is not concerned with the real world. It is concerned simply and solely with the imaginings of the childish mind.
How important is it that Schreber broke down in one way or another when he met major stages in life - getting married, appointed ad a judge, failing as a politician?
If we follow Freud and Abraham’s ideas on the psychoses up to 1925 we will only see part of the picture if we consider their respective papers. Their correspondence reveals a close working relationship. Time does not allow me to go into much of the fascinating detail of those two great minds working together. However the main point I wish to make here is that while Abraham was developing an object relations theory he kept holding himself back in deference to ‘The Professor’ as Freud was always referred to. I will just pick two instances.
1. The First World War had prevented Abraham and Freud being able to meet so that - fortunately some of their collaborative work is recorded in the correspondence between Here for example is Abraham's letter to Freud written in March 1915 and he's commenting on the first draft of Freud's Theory of Melancholia: ‘I should like to remind you not to assert my priority but merely to underline the points of agreement in our findings that I also started from a comparison between melancholic depression and mourning.’
2. Abraham thought that there must be some kind of early stage in his patients, something that happened in their infancy, some predisposing groundwork that makes them vulnerable to such reactions. There must be an infantile prototype.
Abraham was discovering that all this material, especially in the melancholic patients, related to the mother. Current theory said the father was the most important. That the Oedipal theory and the rivalry with the father was the basis for symptomatology and in many of the neurotic patients was true. But here he's coming across evidence that there is a very profound and highly complex relationship between infant and mother. The relation of the father is something that comes later. Abraham then almost in deference to Freud says, we know in other cases the father is the most important and I don't want to overturn established theory but in all my experience of male melancholics the relationship to the mother is the most important. So one can feel that the tendency to almost discount one's own theories in the presence of the great man.
Fairbairn is not just content to disagree with Freud. He has a whole alternative way of thinking. He draws on a different set of ideas which he believes are more appropriate as the foundations of a inter-personal psychology. Scharff and Birtles in examining the roots of Fairbairn ideas state that is reorientation of psychoanalysis assumes a dialectical idea of human nature, an Aristotelian view expanded in the 19th century by Kant [the idea of internal structures as given] and Hegel [the idea of the self and other], who defined human nature as integral and participatory: each individual strives for integration and reciprocity. Mind and body have equal status, and conflict is accommodated through the medium of change and mutually influencing reciprocity between differing elements. For Hegel the innate capacities for language, symbolism and rational thought are understood to be dependent for their development on an adequate environment. The dialectical relationship between subject and object results in a new relationship or synthesis. So it is meaning established between two people that lies at the centre of motivation not pleasure.
A person creates his won identity and individual self based on a meaning derived from relationships. Fairbairn was highly critical of the way in which instinctual energies were reified, even deified in psychoanalytic theory e believed that when pleasure seeking became the foremost motive, there followed a deterioration in the essential relationships of human beings. That there is a failure in the attainment of the capacity for rich and mutual relations with others in which the individuality of the other provides a deeper satisfaction than the use of him or her to provide gratification. (Sutherland P.163)
Fairbairn is in fact suggesting a fundamentally different view of human motivation, human meaning, and human values. Man is not part of a closed system characterised by entropy. Man is a social organism interacting with his environment and being altered by it. Man is not seeking a state of equilibrium or homoeostasis. That would in fact spell death. Life is ongoing because there is a never ceasing involving self transformation and self maintenance. Standing still is not an option. It is through his social environment that man not only maintains himself but maximises his creativity.
