Ronald Fairbairn

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.

March 2005

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

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."

March 2003

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.

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.