Fairbairn’s Theory of Depression
Richard L. Rubens, Ph.D.
Fairbairn developed a theory of endopsychic structure that turned all of psychoanalytic theory on its head: instead of seeing relationships as the result of drive discharge, his theory saw self-expression in relationship as the foundation of all psychic functioning; instead of seeing growth as synonymous with progressive structuralization, it understood the structuring of the self as being a process of splitting and repression that was fundamentally pathological; and, most crucially, instead of a biological theory of the vicissitudes of the instincts, his theory provided a way of understanding both healthy development and psychopathology in terms of the history of attachments. Based on this radically different theory, Fairbairn developed strikingly original and brilliant ways to understand the nature of schizophrenia and schizoid states and the clinical phenomena of hysteria, obsession, phobias, and paranoia. Curiously, however, Fairbairn had very little to say about depression.
What Fairbairn did have to say about depression he adopted directly from Melanie Klein. He never articulated a theory of depression distinctively his own; and it is for this reason that what he has had directly to say on the subject is not nearly so compelling as the rest of his theory. As we shall see, he himself became noticeably disinterested in depression as a concept, and it all but disappeared from his later writings. Nevertheless, depression is an extremely important and ubiquitous issue; and, what is more, Fairbairnindirectlyhas a great deal to offer to our understanding of it. I intend to summarize what Fairbairn did actually write about depression and to examine what his other contributions offer by way of an implicit ‘Fairbairnian’ theory of this most significant clinical entity.
In the two instances in which Fairbairn took up the question of depression before the emergence of his pivotal object relations based theories in the 1940s –a case study in 1936 (1952) and the paper on aggression in 1939 (1994b)– he basically adopted the existing view that aggression and oral sadism were the main issues in the condition.
As I discussed in my review (1996) ofFrom Instinct to Self: The Selected Papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn(Fairbairn, 1994a&b), Melanie Klein’s notion of "positions" had an profound effect on Fairbairn’s object relations theory. Klein had posited the existence of two positions, the paranoid and the depressive. These two developmental stages defined the two earliest phases of the infant’s object relations. Fairbairn quite predictably had difficulty with Klein’s paranoid position, predicated as it was on the death instinct; but he developed in its stead his own most pivotal concept of the schizoid position. The depressive position he adopted intact from Klein. He was profoundly influenced by the metapsychological nature of these positions: they were not biologically determined, zonally characterized stages of instinctual discharge; rather, they were fundamental patterns of interaction which characterized a person’s relation to an other. Fairbairn clearly felt the potential in this notion of positions for a developmental theory based on object relations rather than on drives. It is also true that Klein’s notion allowed him to shift the exploration of the origins of personality and psychopathology away from the Oedipus complex and back into the infant’s first year of life. Most importantly, of course, the concept of the schizoid position, which Fairbairn developed based on this theoretical departure of Klein, became the central factor in his understanding of later human development.
While in the early ‘40s Fairbairn quickly abandoned the drive based epigenetic developmental schema of Freud and Abraham, he retained a notion of the oral stage, since this stage, at least, was based on a relationship between a person and a real or ‘natural’ object, and could be rather directly construed as referring to actual relationship between the infant and its mother. He also accepted the division of the oral stage into
the early oral phase and…the late oral phase, when the biting tendency emerges and takes its place side by side with the sucking tendency. In the late oral phase there occurs a differentiation between oral love, associated with sucking, and oral hate, associated with biting. (1952, p. 24)
About these phases he wrote:
the emotional conflict which arises in relation to object relationships during the early oral phase takes the form of the alternative, ‘to suck or not to suck’, i.e. ‘to love or not to love.’ This is the conflict underlying the schizoid state. On the other hand, the conflict which characterizes the late oral phase resolves itself into the alternative, ‘to suck or to bite’, i.e. ‘to love or to hate.’ This is the conflict underlying the depressive state. It will be seen, accordingly, that the great problem of the schizoid individual is how to love without destroying by love, whereas the great problem of the depressive individual is how to love without destroying by hate. (ibid., p. 49)
Fairbairn noted that, in the late oral phase, "The object may be bitten in so far as it presents itself as bad. This means that differentiated aggression, as well as libido, may be directed towards the object. Hence the appearance of the ambivalence which characterizes the late oral phase." (ibid., p. 49). And, further,
the great problem which confronts the individual in the late oral phase is how to love the object without destroying it by hate. Accordingly, since the depressive reaction has its roots in the late oral phase, it is the disposal of his hate, rather than the disposal of his love, that constitutes the great difficulty of the depressive individual. Formidable as this difficulty is, the depressive is at any rate spared the devastating experience of feeling that his love is bad. Since his love at any rate seems good, he remains inherently capable of a libidinal relationship with outer objects in a sense in which the schizoid is not. His difficulty in maintaining such a relationship arises out of his ambivalence. This ambivalence in turn arises out of the fact that, during the late oral phase, he was more successful than the schizoid in substituting direct aggression (biting) for simple rejection of the object. …the depressive individual readily establishes libidinal contacts with others; and, if his libidinal contacts are satisfactory to him, his progress through life may appear fairly smooth. Nevertheless the inner situation is always present; and it is readily reactivated if his libidinal relationships become disturbed. Any such disturbance immediately calls into operation the hating element in his ambivalent attitude; and, when his hate becomes directed towards the internalized object, a depressive reaction supervenes. (ibid., pp. 54-55)
And he concluded in that paper that
no one ever becomes completely emancipated from the state of infantile dependence, or from some proportionate degree of oral fixation; and there is no one who has completely escaped the necessity of incorporating his early objects. It may be consequently inferred that there is present in everyone an underlying schizoid or an underlying depressive tendency, according as it was in the early or in the late oral phase that difficulties -chiefly attended infantile object-relationships. We are thus introduced to the concept that every individual may be classified as falling into one of two basic psychological types –the schizoid and the depressive. (ibid., p. 56)
All of these quotations are from two papers Fairbairn wrote in 1940 and 1941, and that is pretty much all he had to say about depression. He reiterated this basic view of the depressive position as late as 1951 (ibid., p. 163); but he never had anything further to add to these ideas about depression. So depression was viewed by him as a reaction in which hate and aggression are turned inward against the self when circumstances disturb the object relations of individuals of the depressive type. And this depressive type refers to someone whose basic endopsychic structure is founded on the ambivalence of the late oral phase of development, as opposed to being founded on a schizoid endopsychic structure.
Although Fairbairn never retracted this theory, there was precious little he had to say at all about depression as his theory matured. In his final, succinct summary of his theory in 1963, his only mention of depression is in his statement that the structure of the human psyche "represents a basic schizoid position which is more fundamental than the depressive position described by Melanie Klein," (1994a, p. 156) which certainly does nothing positively to embrace the theory.
While the notion of two positions representing, as Klein had believed, two basic underlying organizations of the psyche sounded reasonable, itneverseemed to Fairbairn that the positions were of equal importance. Right from the beginning, he saw the schizoid position as far more basic and universal. Eventually he concluded that the schizoid position, representing as it did the fundamental state of the existence of split-off subsystems within the self, was the position that underlayallof human psychopathology. And if everyone was schizoid with respect to his underlying endopsychic structure, to whom then would be applied the label depressive? Consequently, Fairbairn began progressively to lose interest in the depressive position, until it all but disappeared from his theory. Moreover, the drive emphasis in the theory of depression as he inherited it from Klein and Freud led him to begin to distance himself from the concept of depression all together.