www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
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.
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.
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 theWhile 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,