The Object-Seeking Libido
Fairbairn's primary contribution to the history of psychoanalytic ideas is a different solution to the problem of the repetition compulsion, a different explanation for the adhesiveness of the libido. William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn ( 1899-1964) was trained in the British Psychoanalytic Society in the 1930s, when Klein's emendations of Freudian theory were predominant. But Fairbairn returned to his home in Edinburgh and spent the rest of his life there, in virtual isolation from the battles in London between the Kleinians and the (Anna) Freudians. This life on the periphery seemed conducive to Fairbairn's developing a radical critique of the basic underpinnings of Freudian theory, in a series of papers beginning in the 1940s.
Fairbairn questioned Freud's premise that the fundamental motivation in life is pleasure and proposed a different starting point: Libido is not pleasureseeking, but object-seeking. The fundamental motivational push in human experience is not gratification and tension reduction, using others as a means toward that end, but connections with others as an end in itself.
Freud's infant operates as an individual organism; others become important only through their function in satisfying the baby's needs. Fairbairn, in contrast, envisioned an infant wired for interaction with a human environment. The premise that libido is object-seeking provides, Fairbairn felt, a much more economical and persuasive framework for explaining Freud's observations of the ubiquity of the repetition compulsion. The libido is adhesive because adhesiveness, rather than plasticity, is its very nature. The child bonds to the parents through whatever forms of contact the parents provide, and those forms become lifelong patterns of attachment and connection to others.
Where is pleasure in Fairbairn's system? Pleasure is one form, perhaps the most wonderful form, of connection with others. If the parents engage in pleasurable exchanges with the child, the child becomes pleasure-seeking, not as an end in itself, but as a learned form of connection and interaction with others.
What if the parents provide mostly painful experiences? Does the child, as Freud's pleasure principle would suggest, avoid the parent and seek other, more pleasure-providing objects? No.
One formative clinical experience for Fairbairn was his work with abused children. He was struck by the intensity of their attachment and loyalty to abusive parents; the lack of pleasure and gratification did not at all weaken the bonds. Rather, these children came to seek pain as a form of
connection, the preferred form of connection, to others. Children, and later adults, seek from others the kinds of contact they experienced early on in their development. Just as ducklings become imprinted onto and follow around whatever caretaking object shows up at the right time ( Lorenz, 1966), so, in Fairbairn's view, do children become powerfully attached to and build their subsequent emotional lives around the kinds of interactions they had with their early caregivers.Consider the centrality of "chemistry" in human romance and relationships in general. Others are not universally desirable according to their pleasure-giving potential. Others are desirable with respect to their resonance with attachments to old objects, avenues and tones of interaction laid down in early childhood as the basic paradigms of love.
Sam sought analysis complaining of a history of unhappy entanglements with very depressed women. He felt great confusion about how it was that he always managed to end up in such relationships. He came from a family in which the parents both felt resigned and crushed by life. Over the course of the analysis, Sam began to realize how much depression had served as a family ideology: Life is miserable; therefore, anyone with any moral fiber or intellectual integrity is miserable; the best we can hope for is to connect with each other through our unhappiness; anyone who is happy is shallow and morally suspect. Sam came to see that he believed any deeply meaningful connection with someone else could only be achieved through pain. Crying with someone was the deepest form of intimacy; laughing with someone was shallow and distancing. Being a good person necessitated bringing oneself down to the level of the other's unhappiness. To be happy in the presence of another's sadness was callous and cruel. It became more and more apparent that, despite his desperate wish for more pleasurable relationships with happier people, Sam selectively and systematically shaped all his important relationships around depressive ties to miserable others. For Fairbairn, libido is object-seeking, and the objects that are found early on become the prototypes for all later experience of connection with others.www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
