William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn (1889–1964) is less widely known than many psychoanalysts. Yet his ideas shape much of how today's therapists think about love, dependence and painful relationships. Working mostly in Edinburgh, away from the debates in London, he wrote a series of papers in the early 1940s that changed Freud's theory at its foundations. Where Freud had placed instinctual drives at the base of mental life, Fairbairn placed the need for relationships. In his view, human beings are not mainly seeking pleasure; they are seeking other people.
This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. It explains Fairbairn's ideas on dependence, the fear that one's own love is harmful, and his model of the inner world. It also shows what they say about a puzzling side of adult love: loyalty to relationships that hurt, and attraction to partners who excite but do not satisfy.
Fairbairn and the British object relations school
"Object relations" refers to a group of theories, developed mainly in Britain from the 1930s onwards, which hold that the mind is formed through relationships with important people, carried inside us as inner pictures. In psychoanalysis, an "object" is not a thing. It simply means a person, or the inner image we hold of a person.
Fairbairn is usually counted, alongside Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Michael Balint, among the main figures of this tradition. Yet his position was distinctive. Klein kept Freud's theory of the life and death instincts and placed inborn aggression at the centre of early development. Fairbairn went further than any of his colleagues: he gave up the drive model altogether.
His papers were collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952). They also influenced Klein directly. In her 1946 paper "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms", Klein acknowledged Fairbairn's work on schizoid states and renamed her "paranoid position" the "paranoid-schizoid position".
We are looking for people, not pleasure
In Freud's theory, as discussed in Freud on Love, libido is a sexual energy that seeks release. Other people matter mainly as the means through which pleasure is obtained.
Fairbairn turned this around. In "A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses" (1941) and later papers, he argued that "libido is primarily object-seeking", not pleasure-seeking. The baby turns to its mother not because she reduces tension, but because it needs a connection with her. Pleasure is a signpost pointing towards the person, not the goal in itself. If the search for relationship comes first, love is not a refined version of the sexual instinct but the most basic human motive.
From this point of view, chasing pleasure for its own sake is a sign that something has gone wrong. When relationships fail, a person turns to substitute satisfactions, as a "safety valve", to cope with the lack of a satisfying connection. Compulsive sexuality, addictive behaviour or solitary ways of soothing oneself can then be understood as signs of a damaged relationship with others, rather than as an unrestrained drive.
From infantile to mature dependence
Instead of Freud's oral, anal and genital stages, Fairbairn described development in terms of how we depend on others. He proposed three phases:
- Infantile dependence. The wholly dependent infant relates to the mother through what Fairbairn called primary identification: the other person is barely felt as separate from the self, and the main attitude is one of taking in.
- The transitional stage. As the child begins to separate, it is pulled between the wish to stay merged and the wish to become separate. Fairbairn saw the obsessional, paranoid, hysterical and phobic "techniques" as different ways of handling this conflict.
- Mature dependence. The goal of development is not independence but a dependence in which self and other are clearly separate. The mature person can give as well as take, and can rely on someone without losing a sense of who they are.
This matters for understanding love. Fairbairn did not see the wish to depend on someone as a weakness to be outgrown. Adult love, in his view, is a healthy dependence between two separate people who need each other. It is neither a fusion in which one disappears into the other, nor a defensive self-sufficiency in which need is denied. This emphasis on lifelong dependence is often seen as an early version of John Bowlby's attachment theory.
When love itself feels dangerous
Fairbairn's first major paper, "Schizoid Factors in the Personality" (1940), was about people who seem detached, self-sufficient and emotionally withdrawn, but who often have an intense hidden inner life. "Schizoid" is used here in a broad psychoanalytic sense. It is wider than the modern diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder.
Fairbairn traced this withdrawal to a specific early experience: the child's sense that its love was not wanted. In his view, a child needs two things most deeply:
- to feel that it is truly loved as a person
- to feel that its own love is truly accepted
When a caregiver is emotionally unavailable or indifferent, the child may conclude not only that it is unloved, but that its love is bad, too much or harmful. From this comes what Fairbairn saw as the central schizoid dilemma: the fear that one's love itself is destructive.
In the depressive dilemma described by Klein, the danger is that hate will destroy the loved person. For the schizoid person, the danger lies in loving.
In adult intimacy, a person shaped by this fear may keep others at a distance, talk about feelings rather than show them, or express affection in a careful, controlled way. Someone may feel deeply attached to a partner yet go quiet whenever things become close. The withdrawal is not an absence of love but a way of protecting others, and the self, from a love that feels dangerous. Guntrip later described the resulting swing between needing closeness and fearing being swallowed up by it, a movement in and out of relationships familiar to many couples.
The inner world as a set of relationships
Fairbairn's best-known contribution is the model of the mind he presented in "Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships" (1944). "Endopsychic" simply means "inside the mind". Offered as an alternative to Freud's id, ego and superego, it describes the inner world as a set of relationships.
The starting point is a child with a caregiver who is needed but, in some ways, unsatisfying. Since the child cannot control or leave the real relationship, it takes the unsatisfying sides of the caregiver inside, where they can at least be managed in fantasy. This inner "bad" object is then split into two parts:
- The exciting object: the caregiver's alluring, promising side: the hope of a closeness that never quite arrives.
- The rejecting object: the caregiver's frustrating, withholding or hostile side.
A part of the self (the ego) is split off along with each of these objects:
- The libidinal ego stays tied to the exciting object, in a state of longing.
- The internal saboteur, which Fairbairn later renamed the antilibidinal ego, sides with the rejecting object. It turns against the person's own neediness and attacks the libidinal ego with contempt for its hope.
- The remaining central ego, the conscious and adaptable self, relates to an idealised version of the caregiver and pushes both of these other systems out of awareness.
The result is a closed inner system in which longing and rejection are played out long after the original relationship has changed. The "internal saboteur" has entered wider clinical language for the part of the self that mocks its own wishes for closeness, a theme that overlaps with discussions of self-sabotage.
The moral defence: blaming oneself to keep others good
In "The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects" (1943), Fairbairn described a further defence that helps explain why children who are treated badly so often blame themselves.
A child cannot afford to see the people it depends on as bad, since that would leave it unprotected. So it takes the badness into itself. The parents stay good, and the child becomes the one who is unworthy or at fault.
Fairbairn called this the moral defence. He summed up its logic in a well-known sentence: "It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil." Guilt keeps hope alive. If the fault is one's own, then being better might still win the missing love. If the fault lies with the other person, nothing can be done. Fairbairn suggested that this exchange buys a sense of outer security at the price of inner insecurity.
Why people stay in painful relationships
Together, these ideas explain patterns that are otherwise hard to understand:
- staying in relationships that are clearly harmful
- going back to partners who have let one down again and again
- being drawn to people who are exciting precisely because they are unavailable
For Fairbairn, such attachments are forms of loyalty to inner objects. The libidinal ego looks for partners who resemble the exciting object. Their on-and-off warmth revives the old hope that the longed-for closeness is about to arrive. By contrast, a partner who is reliably available may feel flat, because he or she does not engage this inner system.
When the exciting partner pulls away, the antilibidinal ego takes over and attacks the self for having hoped at all. The moral defence then makes sure the fault is placed in oneself rather than in the partner. After yet another let-down, the person may think: if I were more interesting, they would stay.
The underlying principle is that, for a dependent child, a bad object is better than no object. This is why leaving a painful relationship can feel less like freedom and more like abandonment.
David Celani's The Illusion of Love (1994) applied this framework to the question of why victims of domestic abuse often return to abusive partners. In couple work, Henry Dicks's Marital Tensions (1967), developed at the Tavistock Clinic, drew on Fairbairn to describe how partners unconsciously cast each other in the roles of their inner objects.
Why Fairbairn's ideas matter in therapy
If a person's difficulties come from attachments to bad inner objects, therapy must help to loosen those attachments.
In his 1943 paper he described the aim as the release of bad objects from the unconscious. He noted that patients resist this release, because it confronts them with the badness of people they once depended on. In this view, much of what is called resistance is really loyalty: a reluctance to give up the inner relationships that have organised one's emotional life.
He also concluded that release is only possible if the therapist is experienced as a sufficiently good object. Without a reliable new relationship, giving up the old ones would mean unbearable emptiness. In "On the Nature and Aims of Psycho-Analytical Treatment" (1958), he argued that the real relationship between patient and analyst is a decisive therapeutic factor, not just the setting in which interpretations are given. This anticipates the later emphasis on the therapeutic relationship across many schools of psychotherapy.
Fairbairn's ideas can help people make sense of patterns such as:
- a repeated pull towards partners who are exciting but unavailable
- feeling bored or uneasy with a partner who is steady and kind
- harsh self-criticism after a disappointment in love
- assuming automatically that one is to blame when a relationship goes wrong
- feeling that needing someone is dangerous or shameful
The work involves recognising these patterns, questioning self-blame, and developing a mature dependence in which needing someone feels safe.
Criticisms and influence
Fairbairn's theory has been criticised on several points:
- Aggression. He treated aggression mostly as a reaction to frustration rather than an inborn drive. Kleinian and classical critics have argued that he underestimated inborn aggression and envy.
- Blaming parents. His focus on failures in the child's environment can lead to an overly simple picture in which parents are the only cause of later difficulties.
- Sexuality and terminology. Sexuality moves into a secondary place, and his language of several egos and objects can seem mechanical. Winnicott, among others, had reservations about parts of his reformulation.
Even so, his influence has lasted:
- Harry Guntrip, who was in analysis with both Fairbairn and Winnicott and described the experience in a well-known 1975 paper, developed Fairbairn's ideas on schizoid withdrawal in Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self (1968).
- John Sutherland's biography (1989) and the collection From Instinct to Self (Scharff & Birtles, 1994) renewed interest in his work.
- In the United States, Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell's Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) presented Fairbairn as the clearest example of a theorist who replaced the drive model with a relational one. Mitchell's Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988) built on this foundation in founding relational psychoanalysis.
- Otto Kernberg's model of inner units linking an image of the self, an image of another person and a feeling, discussed in Kernberg on Love Relations, also draws on Fairbairn's ideas about the structure of the mind.
Conclusion
Fairbairn's central claim is that human beings are, at heart, oriented towards relationships, and that the inner world is built from the relationships available to them. Love is not a disguised instinct but the main aim of the self. Its difficulties arise when early relationships leave a person bound to figures who excite without satisfying, or who reject while still being needed. His ideas of the exciting and rejecting objects, the internal saboteur and the moral defence still help explain why people return to what hurts them. Where attachments to unavailable or painful partners keep recurring, psychodynamic psychotherapy offers a setting in which these inner loyalties can be understood and gradually loosened; online sessions can be arranged here.
References
- Celani, D. P. (1994). The illusion of love: Why the battered woman returns to her abuser. Columbia University Press.
- Dicks, H. V. (1967). Marital tensions: Clinical studies towards a psychological theory of interaction. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1940). Schizoid factors in the personality. In Psychoanalytic studies of the personality (1952). Tavistock Publications.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1941). A revised psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 22.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1943). The repression and the return of bad objects (with special reference to the "war neuroses"). British Journal of Medical Psychology, 19.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1944). Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object-relationships. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 25.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. Tavistock Publications.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1958). On the nature and aims of psycho-analytical treatment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39.
- Greenberg, J. R., & Mitchell, S. A. (1983). Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Harvard University Press.
- Guntrip, H. (1968). Schizoid phenomena, object-relations and the self. Hogarth Press.
- Guntrip, H. (1975). My experience of analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 2, 145–156.
- Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
- Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Harvard University Press.
- Scharff, D. E., & Birtles, E. F. (Eds.). (1994). From instinct to self: Selected papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn (Vols. 1–2). Jason Aronson.
- Sutherland, J. D. (1989). Fairbairn's journey into the interior. Free Association Books.