Ronald Fairbairn

The chapter uses the methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to conduct a single-case study of the life and loves of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003). Leni's childhood home was dominated by her father, who had to be cajoled, and sometimes outright deceived, into supporting his daughter's desire to enter a career in the performing arts. Unfortunately, Leni's success was often her worst enemy: Just as she evaded her father Albert's censorious glance, so did she avoid the barbs of German film critics by gaining Adolf Hitler as her patron until the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. At this time, Leni lost not only her marriage and her film career, but even her sanity, if only for a short time. The chapter shows, through a Fairbairnian analysis, how Leni adapted to the disaster that was her early career by reinventing herself as a photographer of African tribes. Also, in her romantic life, she changed tacks. Compared with her late-in-life companion Horst Kettner, Leni's early romances were relatively shallow either because her counterpart was too involved in promoting her career (Harry Sokal) or too far removed from her working life (Peter Jacob).

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Wild Strawberries is a resolved study in unresolved psychic pain. Bergman’s own deep feeling of having been an unwanted baby is an underlying driver of the film, a common root of the suffering of protagonist Isak Borg and others in his family. Yet the film also pictures a possible break in the transgenerational transmission of parental rejection. An interpretation of Wild Strawberries is offered, including reflection on its tribute to Viktor Sjostrom’s 1921 film "The Phantom Carriage"; a reading of the first dream sequence as a sleep
paralysis dream; and a consideration of generativity internal to the film, contrasted with the author’s generativity in creating it. Ronald Fairbairn is a useful thinker for Wild Strawberries , not only in his account of schizoid character, but in his modification of the concept of libido: it is not (only) frustrated sexual desire, but (mainly) frustrated object-seeking, which gets sublimated into art by the filmmaker but tragically repressed by his protagonist. Bergman’s film depicts a journey of profound self-discovery that does achieve meaning, but far too late in Borg’s life to permit a
change of course. It seems love and its lack determine our pain; work and its success or failure determine the fate of that pain in generativity or in stagnation.

Original scanned copy. December 2005.

A review of Stanley Kunitz's poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz's elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as "reversing a passive relation to mother or matrix."

May 2006.

First paragraph: 
Patrick McEvoy-Halston1ENG 5063Alan Ackerman10 May 2006Moderns and their Mothers’ Reach: Returning to the Empowered Mother in TennesseeWilliams’
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
In
Terrible Honesty
, Ann Douglas argues that moderns felt they needed to find away to free themselves from their Victorian predecessors, and discusses how the cultural products of the modern period worked to fashion a milieu which enabled moderns to feelfree from their influence and command. Free, they fashioned one of the richest cultural periods that have ever existed. But she also argues that the moderns knew that a pricewould have to be paid for all this growth. She writes that they knew at some point, theMaternal—the “element” they repressed and beat back—would make stage a return, andmake them pay for their insolence. Some theorists—especially those influenced byobject-relations thought—argue, however, that the nature of how most of us experienceour own self growth and freedom would ensure that moderns would
themselves
stage thereturn to a matriarchal environment—that is, that She wouldn’t need to return, for theywould feel compelled to “come visit her.” I hope to suggest that some modernist playsmay have well served to both help effect the matricide Douglas argues modernist cultural products helped effect, and to vicariously offer them a means by which to temporarilyreturn to the maternally dominating environment they so loathed and feared. [...]

Original copy. March 2005

Explores how Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man" delineates a repeated pattern by the invisible man, whereby he associates with grandiose people of some sort of esteem, and ends up actually being seen by them in a way he rather favours. These figures underestimate him at first, look past him, but eventually draw focus, something they are made out as only doing by his demonstrating himself distinct either as threat or prize. Garnering this acquisition, and then leaving to obtain it from others still foreign to penetrating through to something ostensibly core, something ostensibly individualized, distinct and worthy, about him, is his regular life pattern. He's delineated as a master at making those with a glassy eye, a glassy gaze, towards him, attend to him with some real clarity, some valid registration of the actual person before them.

Invisible Man, the invisible man repeatedly draws our attention to how he captures the attention of discerning individuals. Supposedly, this is not the sort of attention he craves. What he really wants, he tells us, is for others to take an interest in him, but not only so to better discern if he is useful or a threat. Unfortunately, "[n]o one really wished to hear what [he] [.. .] called himself" (573). We have reason to believe, however, that the attention he does receive is exactly the sort he craves-or, rather, the sort he can enjoy and still live with. For not only does he consistently show in his account that he attends to whether or not people take "special" (301) notice of him, he shows he prefers they not interact with him in a manner that makes it difficult to at some point leave them behind. When the invisible man drives Mr. Norton about town, he remembers an experience from his early school years that influenced him profoundly. He recalls having seen photographs of black men and women who appeared "almost without individuality, a black mob," along with "striking" white people who possessed "clear [.. .] features" (39). Believing his association with the Founder's college has already provided him with some status, he obviously hopes that the distinguished white man, Mr. Norton, will reinforce his preferred sense of himself as "not just another face in the crowd." However, Mr. Norton makes him feel as he wasn't actually "seen" by him, that is, as if Mr. Norton saw "only [his] [.. .] surroundings, [him]self, or figments of [his] [.. .] imagination-indeed, everything and anything except [the invisible man]" (3). He says things which seem to suggest that the invisible man matters to him, that his particular identity, who he is and who he will become, is important to him. For example, Mr. Norton says that his own "fate" (44) depends upon the nature of the invisible man's progress through life. He also suggests that an intimate connection exists between the two of them-"So you see, young man, you are involved in my life quite intimately, even though you've never seen me before" (43). However, the invisible man detects something about the way they are interacting which has him doubt how much he actually does mean to him. He gauges that Mr. Norton talks to him "like someone in a book" (44) would, and if he means here that Mr. Norton is not speaking to him in a manner which suggests that specific context he is in, the specific person he is talking to, interest or affect him enough to determine his delivery, he is exactly right.

March 2005

El concepto de relación de objeto ha sido un potente concepto para el trabajo clínico y para la escuela de las relaciones objetales dentro del psicoanálisis desde 1930. En 1970 surge el concepto de vínculo que tiene como antecedente la relación de objeto. El objetivo de este trabajo fue identificar aquello que se mantiene y se modifica del concepto de vínculo respecto de la relación objetal. Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica de 40 artículos y textos en idioma español sobre los autores que analizaron ambos conceptos en Redalyc, SciELO, RedBUSUSAL y APAPsiBase. Se encontraron autores que abonan la postura en la que el vínculo contiene y amplía la relación de objeto.

El concepto de relación de objeto ha sido un potente concepto para el trabajo clínico y para la escuela de las relaciones objetales dentro del psicoanálisis desde 1930. En 1970 surge el concepto de vínculo que tiene como antecedente la relación de objeto. El objetivo de este trabajo fue identificar aquello que se mantiene y se modifica del concepto de vínculo respecto de la relación objetal. Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica de 40 artículos y textos en idioma español sobre los autores que analizaron ambos conceptos en Redalyc, SciELO, RedBUSUSAL y APAPsiBase. Se encontraron autores que abonan la postura en la que el vínculo contiene y amplía la relación de objeto.

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.

This article is a fictional account of supervision with late Scottish psychoanalyst, W.R.D. Fairbairn. It systematically reviews each of his major theoretical works and seeks to apply his object-relations theory of the personality to an actual case of the author's. Through a careful blend of historical detail, primary source material, and a contemporary case, it hopes to enable the reader to imagine what supervision may have been like with Fairbairn and to demonstrate the relevance of his theories to modern clinical practice.

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.

March 2005

Recent thinking has identified a viewpoint common to three Scottish thinkers influential in the fields of psychoanalysis and philosophy-Fairbairn, Macmurray and Suttie. A recent argument by Gerson (2004) concerning the political implications of a strand of Independent object relations thinking that explicitly includes Fairbairn and Suttie is reviewed and its findings described briefly. Gerson argues that this strand of thinking has its origins in the development of the welfare state. The possibility that the real origins of this viewpoint can be found in social thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment is developed here as a research question. (2005)

Explores the ability of the narrator to be honest with the difficulties -- not displace, repress, elide/evade concerns -- they had in their mother-child relationship, in several works of literature, including Cocteau's "Les Enfants Terribles," Alice Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women." and Andrea Ashworth's "Once in a House on Fire."

Scanned original copy. July 2005

Explores select works of Matthew Arnold, as well as Robert Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos” and Edward Fitzgerald’s “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” for evidence that societal growth during the late 19th-century was done not entirely in hopes of leaving previous authorities behind, of accepting and dealing with felt feelings of being abandoned for their focus on their own selves rather than parental ways; there was evidence of regression, clinging back. Poetry, I am suggesting in this short paper, began to manifest the parental imago in a manner that would either flatter their preferred self-image/conception and thereby be to their liking (with Arnold), or that would presumably draw back their presumably withdrawn attention and interest through newly aroused ire, placing the poet back into a mere bratty kid rather than introducer of the new (Browning, Fitzgerald).