October 27,2006
Harry Guntrip (1975)
(1975). My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott: How Complete a
Result Does Psycho-Analytic Therapy Achieve? International Review of
Psycho-Analysis, 2:145-156
Harry Guntrip
It does not seem to me useful to attempt a purely theoretical answer to the
question forming the sub-title. Theory does not seem to me to be the major
concern. It is a useful servant but a bad master, liable to produce orthodox
defenders of every variety of the faith. We ought always to sit light to theory
and be on the look-out for ways of improving it in the light of therapeutic
practice. It is therapeutic practice that is the real heart of the matter. In
the last resort good therapists are born not trained, and they make the best use
of training. Maybe the question 'How complete a result can psycho-analytic
therapy produce?' raises the question 'How complete a result did our own
training analysis produce?' Analysts are advised to be open to post-analytic
improvements, so presumably we do not expect 'an analysis' to do a 'total' once
for all job. We must know about post-analytic developments if we are to assess
the actual results of the primary analysis. We cannot deal with this question
purely on the basis of our patients' records. They must be incomplete for the
primary analysis and non-existent afterwards. As this question had unexpected
and urgent relevance in my case, I was compelled to grapple with it; so I shall
risk offering an account of my own analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott, and
its after-effects: especially as this is the only way I can present a realistic
picture of what I take to be the relationship between the respective
contributions of these two outstanding analysts, and what I owe to them.
The question 'How complete a result is possible?' had compelling importance for
me because it is bound up with an unusual factor; a total amnesia for a severe
trauma at the age of three and a half years, over the death of a younger
brother. Two analyses failed to break through that amnesia, but it was resolved
unexpectedly after they had ended, certainly only because of what they had
achieved in 'softening up' the major repression. I hope this may have both a
theoretical and a human interest. The long quest for a solution to that problem
has been too introverted an interest to be wholly welcomed, but I had no option,
could not ignore it, and so turned it into a vocation through which I might help
others. Both Fairbairn and Winnicott thought that but for that trauma, I might
not have become a psychotherapist. Fairbairn once said: 'I can't think what
could motivate any of us to become psychotherapists, if we hadn't got problems
of our own'. He was no super-optimist and once said to me: 'The basic pattern of
personality once fixed in early childhood, can't be altered. Emotion can be
drained out of the old patterns by new experience, but water can always flow
again in the old dried up water courses'. You cannot give anyone a different
history. On another occasion he said: 'You can go on analysing for ever and get
nowhere. It's the personal relation that is therapeutic. Science has no values
except scientific values, the schizoid values of the investigator who stands
outside of life and watches. It is purely instrumental, useful for a time but
then you have to get back to living.' That was his view of the 'mirror analyst',
a non-relating observer simply interpreting. Thus he held that psychoanalytic
interpretation is not therapeutic per se, but only as it expresses a personal
relationship of genuine understanding. My own view is that science is not
necessarily schizoid, but is really practically motivated, and often becomes
schizoid because it offers such an obvious retreat for schizoid intellectuals.
There is no place for this in psychotherapy of any kind.
I already held the view that psychoanalytic therapy is not a purely theoretical
but a truly
Copyright ?Estate of Harry Guntrip
We announce with regret that Dr Guntrip died on 18 February 1975.
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understanding personal relationship, and had published it in my first book
before I had heard of Fairbairn; after reading his papers in 1949, I went to him
because we stood philosophically on the same ground and no actual intellectual
disagreements would interfere with the analysis. But the capacity for forming a
relationship does not depend solely on our theory. Not everyone has the same
facility for forming personal relationships, and we can all form a relationship
more easily with some people than with others. The unpredictable factor of
'natural fit' enters in. Thus, in spite of his conviction Fairbairn did not have
the same capacity for natural, spontaneous 'personal relating' that Winnicott
had. With me he was more of a 'technical interpreter' than he thought he was, or
than I expected: but that needs qualification. I went to him in the 1950s when
he was past the peak of his creative powers of the 1940s, and his health was
slowly failing. He told me that in the 1930s and 1940s he had treated a number
of schizophrenic and regressed patients with success. That lay behind his
'theoretical revision' in the 1940s. He felt he had made a mistake in publishing
his theory before the clinical evidence. From 1927 to 1935 he was psychiatrist
at The University Psychological Clinic for Children, and did a lot of work for
the N.S.P.C.C. One cannot be impersonal with children. He asked one child whose
mother thrashed her cruelly: 'Would you like me to find you a new kind Mummy?'
She said: 'No. I want my own Mummy', showing the intensity of the libidinal tie
to the bad object. The devil you know is better than the devil you do not, and
better than no devil at all. Out of such experience with psychotic, regressed
and child patients, his theoretical revision grew, based on the quality of
parent?hild relations, rather than the stages of biological growth, a
'personality-theory' not an impersonal 'energy-control theory'. He summed it up
in saying that 'the cause of trouble is that parents somehow fail to get it
across to the child that he is loved for his own sake, as a person in his own
right'. By the 1950s when I was with him, he wisely declined to take the strains
of severely regressing patients. To my surprise I found him gradually falling
back on the 'classical analyst' with an 'interpretative technique', when I felt
I needed to regress to the level of that severe infancy trauma.
Stephen Morse (1972), in his study of 'structure' in the writings of Winnicott
and Balint, concluded that they discovered new data but did not develop
structural theory in a way that could explain them; which, however, he felt
could be done by what he called the 'Fairbairn?untrip metaphor'. Having had the
benefit of analysis with both these outstanding analysts, I feel the position is
somewhat more complex than that. The relation between Fairbairn and Winnicott is
both theoretically important and very intriguing. Superficially they were quite
unlike each other in type of mind and method of working, which prevented their
knowing how basically close they were in the end. Both had deep roots in classic
Freudian theory and therapy, and both outgrew it in their own different ways.
Fairbairn saw that intellectually more clearly than Winnicott. Yet in the 1950s
Fairbairn was more orthodox in clinical practice than Winnicott. I had just over
1, 000 sessions with Fairbairn in the 1950s and just over 150 with Winnicott in
the 1960s. For my own benefit I kept detailed records of every session with both
of them, and all their correspondence. Winnicott said, 'I've never had anyone
who could tell me so exactly what I said last time.' Morse's article suggested a
restudy of those records last year, and I was intrigued to find the light they
cast on why my two analyses failed to resolve my amnesia for that trauma at
three and a half years, and yet each in different ways prepared for its
resolution as a post-analytic development. I had to ask afresh, 'What is the
analytic therapeutic process?'
In general I found Fairbairn becoming more orthodox in practice than in theory
while Winnicott was more revolutionary in practice than in theory. They were
complementary opposites. Sutherland in his obituary notice (1965) wrote:
Fairbairn had a slightly formal air about himotably aristocratic, but in
talking to him I found he was not at all formal or remote. Art and religion were
for him profound expressions of man's needs, for which he felt a deep respect,
but his interests revealed his rather unusual conservatism.
I found him formal in sessions, the intellectually precise interpreting analyst,
but after sessions we discussed theory and he would unbend, and I found the
human Fairbairn as we talked face to
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face. Realistically, he was my understanding good father after sessions, and in
sessions in the transference he was my dominating bad mother imposing exact
interpretations. After his experimental creative 1940s, I feel his conservatism
slowly pushed through into his work in the 1950s. The shock of his wife's sudden
death in 1952 created obvious domestic problems. Early in the 1950s he had the
first attack of viral influenza, and these became more virulent as the decade
advanced. For two years after his wife's death he worked hard on his fine paper,
'Observations on the nature of hysterical states' (Fairbairn, 1954) which
finalized his original thinking. He clarified his views on 'psychoanalysis and
science' in two papers (Fairbairn, 1952b), (1955). But there was a subtle change
in his next paper, 'Considerations arising out of the Schreber case' (Fairbairn,
1956). Here he fell back from his 'ego and object relations' psychology,
explaining everything as due to 'primal scene' libidinal excitations and fears.
Finally, in his last paper, 'On the nature and aims of psycho-analytical
treatment' (Fairbairn, 1958) his entire emphasis was on the 'internal closed
system' of broadly oedipal analysis, not in terms of instincts, but of
internalized libidinized and antilibidinized bad-object relations. I went to him
to break through the amnesia for that trauma of my brother's death, to whatever
lay behind it in the infancy period. There, I felt, lay the cause of my vague
background experiences of schizoid isolation and unreality, and I knew that they
had to do with my earliest relations with mother, though only because of
information she had given me.
After brother Percy's death I entered on four years of active battle with mother
to force her 'to relate', and then gave it up and grew away from her. I will
call that, for convenience, the oedipal internalized bad-object relations
period: it filled my dreams, but repeatedly sudden, clear schizoid experiences
would erupt into this, and Fairbairn steadily interpreted them as 'withdrawal'
in the sense of 'escapes' from internalized bad-object relations. He repeatedly
brought me back to oedipal three-person libidinal and anti-libidinal conflicts
in my 'inner world', Kleinian 'object splits' and Fairbairnian 'ego splits' in
the sense of oedipal libidinal excitations. In 1956 I wrote to ask him to say
exactly what he thought about the Oedipus complex, and he replied: 'The Oedipus
complex is central for therapy but not for theory.' I replied that I could not
accept that: for me theory was the theory of therapy, and what was true for one
must be true for both. I developed a double resistance to him consciously,
partly feeling he was my bad mother forcing her views on me, and partly openly
disagreeing with him on genuine grounds. I began to insist that my real problem
was not the bad relationships of the post-Percy period, but mother's basic
'failure to relate at all' right from the start. I said that I felt oedipal
analysis kept me marking time on the same spot, making me use bad relations as
better than none at all, keeping them operative in my inner world as a defence
against the deeper schizoid problem. He saw that as a defensive character trait
of 'withdrawness' (Fairbairn, 1952a, chap. 1). I felt it as a problem in its own
right, not just a defence against his closed-system 'internal world of
bad-object relations'.
But my oedipal analysis with Fairbairn was not a waste of time. Defences have to
be analysed and it brought home to me that I had actually repressed the trauma
of Percy's death and all that lay behind it, by building over it a complex
experience of sustained struggle in bad-object relations with mother, which in
turn I had also to repress. It was the basis of my spate of dreams, and
intermittent production of conversion symptoms. Fairbairn for long insisted that
it was the real core of my psychopathology. He was certainly wrong, but it did
have to be radically analysed to open the way to the deeper depths. That
happened. Steadily regressive and negative schizoid phenomena thrust into the
material I brought to him, and at last he began to accept in theory what he no
longer had the health to cope with in practice. He generously accepted my
concept of a 'regressed ego' split off from his 'libidinal ego' and giving up as
hopeless the struggle to get a response from mother. When I published that idea,
Winnicott wrote to ask: 'Is your Regressed Ego withdrawn or repressed?' I
replied: 'Both. First withdrawn and then kept repressed'. Fairbairn wrote to
say:
This is your own idea, not mine, original, and it explains what I have never
been able to account for in my theory, Regression. Your emphasis on ego-weakness
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yields better therapeutic results than interpretation in terms of libidinal and
anti-libidinal tensions.
When in 1960 I wrote 'Ego-weakness, the hard core of the problem of
psychotherapy' he wrote to say: 'If I could write now, that is what I would
write about'. I knew my theory was broadly right for it conceptualized what I
could not yet get analysed. With I think great courage, he accepted that.
I shall complete my account of Fairbairn as analyst and man by illustrating the
difference in 'human type' between him and Winnicott, a factor that plays a big
part in therapy. The set-up of the consulting room itself creates an atmosphere
which has meaning. Fairbairn lived in the country and saw patients in the old
Fairbairn family house in Edinburgh. I entered a large drawing room as waiting
room, furnished with beautiful valuable antiques, and proceeded to the study as
consulting room, also large with a big antique bookcase filling most of one
wall. Fairbairn sat behind a large flat-topped desk, I used to think 'in state'
in a high-backed plush-covered armchair. The patient's couch had its head to the
front of the desk. At times I thought he could reach over the desk and hit me on
the head. It struck me as odd for an analyst who did not believe in the
'mirror-analyst' theory. Not for a long time did I realize that I had 'chosen'
that couch position, and there was a small settee at the side of his desk at
which I could sit if I wished, and ultimately I did. That this imposing
situation at once had an unconscious transference meaning for me became clear in
a dream in the first month. I must explain that my father had been a Methodist
Local Preacher of outstanding eloquence as a public speaker, and from 1885 built
up and led a Mission Hall which grew into a Church which still exists. In all my
years of dreaming he never appeared as other than a supportive figure vis-?vis
mother, and in actual fact she never lost her temper in his presence. I wanted
Fairbairn in transference as the protective father, helping me to stand up to my
aggressive mother, but unconsciously I felt otherwise, for I dreamed:
I was in father's Mission Hall. Fairbairn was on the platform but he had
mother's hard face. I lay passive on a couch on the floor of the Hall, with the
couch head to the front of the platform. He came down and said: 'Do you know the
door is open?' I said: 'I didn't leave it open', and was pleased I had stood up
to him. He went back to the platform.
It was a thinly disguised version of his consulting room set-up, and showed that
I wanted him to be my supportive father, but that wish was overpowered by a
clear negative transference from my severe dominating mother. That remained by
and large Fairbairn's transference role 'in sessions'. He interpreted it as the
'one up and the other down' bad parent?hild 'see-saw' relation. It can only be
altered by turning the tables. I found that very illuminating, containing all
the ingredients of unmet needs, smothered rage, inhibited spontaneity. It was
the dominant transference relationship in sessions. After sessions Fairbairn
could unbend in our theory and therapy discussion, the good human father.
This negative transference in sessions was, I feel, fostered by his very
intellectually precise interpretations. Once he interpreted: 'Something
forecloses on the active process in the course of its development'. I would have
said: 'Your mother squashed your naturally active self'. But he accurately
analysed my emotional struggle to force mother to mother me after Percy died,
and showed how I had internalized it. That had to be done first, but he held it
to be the central oedipal problem, and could not accept till it was too late,
that this masked a far deeper and more serious problem. Later Winnicott twice
remarked: 'You show no signs of ever having had an Oedipus complex'. My family
pattern was not oedipal. It was always the same in dreams and is shown by the
most striking one of them.
I was being besieged and was sitting in a room discussing it with father. It was
mother who was besieging me and I said to him: 'You know I'll never give in to
her. It doesn't matter what happens. I'll never surrender'. He said, 'Yes. I
know that. I'll go and tell her' and he went and said to her, 'You'd better give
it up. You'll never make him submit', and she did give up.
Fairbairn's persistence in oedipal interpretations I could not accept as final,
cast him in the role of the dominating mother. It came to our ears that
Winnicott and Hoffer thought my adherence to his theory was due to its not
allowing him to analyse my aggression in the transference. But
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they didn't see me knock over his pedestal ashtray, and kick his glass
door-stopper, 'accidentally' of course, and we know what that means in sessions,
as he was not slow to point out. They did not see me once strew some of his
books out of that huge bookcase over the floor, symbolic of 'tearing a response
out of mother', and then putting them back tidily to make reparation ?la Melanie
Klein. But after sessions we could discuss and I could find the natural
warm-hearted human being behind the exact interpreting analyst.
I can best make this clear by comparison with Winnicott. His consulting room was
simple, restful in colours and furniture, unostentatious, carefully planned, so
Mrs Winnicott told me, by both of them, to make the patient feel at ease. I
would knock and walk in, and presently Winnicott would stroll in with a cup of
tea in his hand and a cheery 'Hallo', and sit on a small wooden chair by the
couch. I would sit on the couch sideways or lie down as I felt inclined, and
change position freely according to how I felt or what I was saying. Always at
the end, as I departed he held out his hand for a friendly handshake. As I was
finally leaving Fairbairn after the last session, I suddenly realized that in
all that long period we had never once shaken hands, and he was letting me leave
without that friendly gesture. I put out my hand and at once he took it, and I
suddenly saw a few tears trickle down his face. I saw the warm heart of this man
with a fine mind and a shy nature. He invited my wife and me to tea whenever we
visited her mother in Perthshire.
To make the ending of my analysis with Fairbairn meaningful, I must give a brief
sketch of my family history. My mother was an overburdened 'little mother'
before she married, the eldest daughter of 11 children and saw four siblings
die. Her mother was a feather-brained beauty queen, who left my mother to manage
everything even as a schoolgirl. She ran away from home at the age of twelve
because she was so unhappy, but was brought back. Her best characteristic was
her strong sense of duty and responsibility to her widowed mother and three
younger siblings, which impressed my father when they all joined his Mission
Hall. They married in 1898 but he did not know that she had had her fill of
mothering babies and did not want any more. In my teens she occasionally became
confidential and told me the salient facts of family history, including that she
breastfed me because she believed it would prevent another pregnancy; she
refused to breast-feed Percy and he died, after which she refused further
intimacy. My father was the youngest son of a High-Church and high Tory family,
the politically left-wing and religiously Nonconformist rebel; and
anti-imperialist who nearly lost his position in the City by refusing to sign
his firm's pro-Boer War petition. That passing anxiety gave my mother the chance
to wean me suddenly and start a business of her own. We moved when I was one
year old. She chose a bad site and lost money steadily for seven years, though
everything was more than retrieved by the next move. That first seven years of
my life, six of them at the first shop, was the grossly disturbed period for me.
I was left to the care of an invalid aunt who lived with us. Percy was born when
I was two years old and died when I was three and a half. Mother told me father
said he would have lived if she had breast-fed him, and she got angry. It was a
disturbed time. In her old age, living in our home, she would say some revealing
things. 'I ought never to have married and had children. Nature did not make me
to be a wife and mother, but a business woman', and 'I don't think I ever
understood children. I could never be bothered with them'.
She told me that at three and a half years I walked into a room and saw Percy
lying naked and dead on her lap. I rushed up and grabbed him and said: 'Don't
let him go. You'll never get him back!' She sent me out of the room and I fell
mysteriously ill and was thought to be dying. Her doctor said: 'He's dying of
grief for his brother. If your mother wit can't save him, I can't', so she took
me to a maternal aunt who had a family, and there I recovered. Both Fairbairn
and Winnicott thought I would have died if she had not sent me away from
herself. All memory of that was totally repressed. The amnesia held through all
the rest of my life and two analyses, till I was 70, three years ago. But it
remained alive in me, to be triggered off unrecognized by widely spaced
analogous events. At the age of 26, at the University, I formed a good
friendship with a fellow student who was a brother figure to me. When he left
and I went
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home on vacation to mother, I fell ill of a mysterious exhaustion illness which
disappeared immediately I left home and returned to College. I had no idea that
it was equivalent to that aunt's family. In 1938, aged 37, I became minister of
a highly organized Church in Leeds, with a Sunday afternoon meeting of 1, 000
men, an evening congregation of 800, and well organized educational, social and
recreational activities. It was too large for one minister and I had a colleague
who became another Percy-substitute. He left as war clouds loomed up. Again I
suddenly fell ill of the same mysterious exhaustion illness. It was put down to
overwork, but by then I was psychoanalytically knowledgeable, had studied
classical theory under Flugel, knew the stock literature, had an uncompleted
M.A. thesis under supervision of Professor John Macmurray, seeking to translate
Freud's psychobiology, or rather clinical data, into terms of 'personal
relations' philosophy, and had studied my own dreams for two years. So I was
alerted when this illness brought a big dream.
I went down into a tomb and saw a man buried alive. He tried to get out but I
threatened him with illness, locked him in and got away quick.
Next morning I was better. For the first time I recognized the re-eruption of my
illness after Percy's death, and saw that I lived permanently over the top of
its repression. I knew then I could not rest till that problem was solved.
I was drawn into war-time emergency psychotherapy by the Leeds Professor of
Medicine, appointed to a lectureship in the Medical School, and went on studying
my own dreams. I recently re-read the record and found I had only made forced
text-bookish oedipal interpretations. Of more importance was that three dominant
types of dream stood out: (1) a savage woman attacking me, (2) a quiet, firm,
friendly father-figure supporting me, and (3) a mysterious death-threat dream,
the clearest example based on the memory of mother taking me at the age of six
into the bedroom of my invalid aunt, thought to be dying of rheumatic fever,
lying white and silent. In one dream:
I was working downstairs at my desk and suddenly an invisible band of ectoplasm
tying me to a dying invalid upstairs, was pulling me steadily out of the room. I
knew I would be absorbed into her. I fought and suddenly the band snapped and I
knew I was free.
I knew enough to guess that the memory of my dying aunt was a screen memory for
the repressed dead Percy, which still exercised on me an unconscious pull out of
life into collapse and apparent dying. I knew that somehow sometime I must get
an analysis. In 1946 Professor Dicks appointed me as the first staff member of
the new Department of Psychiatry, and said that with my views I must read
Fairbairn. I did so and at the end of 1949 I sought analysis with him.
For the first few years, his broadly oedipal analysis of my 'internalized
bad-object relations' world did correspond to an actual period of my childhood.
After Percy's death and my return home, from the age of three and a half to
five, I fought to coerce mother into mothering me by repeated petty
psychosomatic ills, tummyaches, heat spots, loss of appetite, constipation and
dramatic, sudden high temperatures, for which she would make me a tent-bed on
the kitchen couch and be in and out from the shop to see me. She told me the
doctor said: 'I'll never come to that child again. He frightens the life out of
me with these sudden high temperatures and next morning he's perfectly well'.
But it was all to no purpose. Around five years I changed tactics. A new bigger
school gave me more independence, and mother said: 'You began not to do what I
told you'. She would fly into violent rages and beat me, from about the time I
was five to the age of seven. When canes got broken I was sent to buy a new one.
At the age of seven I went to a still larger school and steadily developed a
life of my own outside the home. We moved when I was eight to another shop where
mother's business was an outstanding success. She became less depressed, gave me
all the money I needed for hobbies and outdoor activities, scouting, sport, and
gradually I forgot not quite all the memories of the first seven bad years. It
was all the fears, rages, guilts, psychosomatic transient symptoms, disturbed
dreams, venting the conflicts of those years from three and a half to seven,
that Fairbairn's analysis dealt with. In mother's old age she said: 'When your
father and Aunt Mary died and I was alone, I tried keeping a dog but I had to
give it up. I couldn't stop
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beating it'. That's what happened to me. No wonder I had an inner world of
internalized libidinally excited bad-object relations, and I owe much to
Fairbairn's radical analysis of it.
But after the first three or four years I became convinced that this was keeping
me marking time in a sadomasochistic inner world of badobject relations with
mother, as a defence against quite different problems of the period before
Percy's death. This deeper material kept pushing through. The crunch came in
December 1957 when my old friend whose departure from College caused the first
eruption of that Percyillness in 1927, suddenly died. For the third time
exhaustion seized me. I kept going enough to work and travel to Edinburgh for
analysis, feeling I would now get to the bottom of it. Then, just as I felt some
progress was being made, Fairbairn fell ill with a serious viral influenza of
which he nearly died, and was off work six months. I had to reinstate
repression, but at once began to 'intellectualize' the problem I could not work
through with him in person. It was not pure intellectualization by deliberate
thinking. Spontaneous insights kept welling up at all sorts of times, and I
jotted them down as they flowed with compelling intensity. Out of all that I
wrote three papers; they became the basis of my book Schizoid Phenomena,
Object-Relations and The Self (1968): 'Ego-weakness, the core of the problem of
psycho-therapy' written in 1960 (chapter 6), 'The schizoid problem, regression
and the struggle to preserve an ego' (chapter 2) written in 1961, and 'The
manic-depressive problem in the light of the schizoid process' (chapter 5)
written in 1962. In two years they took me right beyond Fairbairn's halting
point. He generously accepted this as a valid and necessary extension of his
theory.
When he returned to work in 1959, I discussed my friend's death and Fairbairn's
illness and he made a crucial interpretation: 'I think since my illness I am no
longer your good father or bad mother, but your brother dying on you'. I
suddenly saw the analytical situation in an extraordinary light, and wrote him a
letter which I still have, but did not send. I knew it would put a bigger strain
on him than he could stand in his precarious health. I suddenly saw that I could
never solve my problem with an analyst. I wrote: 'I am in a dilemma. I have got
to end my analysis to get a chance to finish it, but then I do not have you to
help me with it.' Once Fairbairn had become my brother in transference, losing
him either by ending analysis myself, or by staying with him till he died, would
represent the death of Percy, and I would be left with a full scale eruption of
that traumatic event, and no one to help me with it. Could Fairbairn have helped
me with that in transference analysis? Not in his frail state of health and I
phased out my analysis in that year. I have much cause to be grateful to him for
staying with me, in his increasingly weak state of health, till I had reached
that critical insight. The driving force behind my theory writing in 1959?962
was the reactivation of the Percy-trauma, causing a compelling spate of
spontaneous ideas. I could contain it and use it for constructive research,
partly because I was giving Fairbairn up gradually, partly because he accepted
the validity of my ideas, and partly because I had resolved to seek analysis
with Winnicott before Fairbairn died.
Fairbairn first introduced me to Winnicott in 1954 by asking him to send me a
copy of his paper: 'Regression Within the Psycho-Analytical Set-Up' (in
Winnicott, 1958). He sent it and, rather to my surprise, a letter saying: 'I do
invite you to look into the matter of your relation to Freud, so that you may
have your own relation and not Fairbairn's. He spoils his good work by wanting
to knock down Freud'. We exchanged three long letters on each side. I stated
that my relation to Freud had been settled years before I had heard of
Fairbairn, when studying under Flugel at University College, London. I rejected
Freud's psychobiology of instincts, but saw the great importance of his
discoveries in psychopathology. Regarding that correspondence I now find I
anticipated Morse's (1972) conclusion almost in his words, 18 years earlier:
that Winnicott's 'true self' has no place in Freud's theory. It could only be
found in the id, but that is impossible because the id is only impersonal
energy. In fact I felt that Winnicott had left Freud as far behind in therapy as
Fairbairn had done in theory. In 1961 I sent him a copy of my book Personality
Structure and Human Interaction(Guntrip, 1961) and he replied that he had
already purchased a
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copy. I was reading his papers as they were published, as also was Fairbairn who
described him as 'clinically brilliant'. By 1962 I had no doubt that he was the
only man I could turn to for further help. I was by then only free to visit
London once a month for a couple of sessions, but the analysis I had had made it
easier to profit by that. From 1962 to 1968 I had 150 sessions and their value
was out of all proportion to their number. Winnicott said he was surprised that
so much could be worked through in such widely spaced sessions, due I think in
the first place to all the preliminary clearing that had been done by Fairbairn
and to the fact that I could keep the analysis alive between visits; but most of
all to Winnicott's profound intuitive insights into the very infancy period I so
needed to get down to. He enabled me to reach extraordinarily clear evidence
that my mother had almost certainly had an initial period of natural maternalism
with me as her first baby, for perhaps a couple of months, before her
personality problems robbed me of that 'good mother'. I had quite forgotten that
letter I did not send to Fairbairn about the dilemma of not being able either to
end analysis or go on with it, once my analyst became Percy in the transference.
Ending it would be equivalent to Percy dying and I would have no one to help me
with the aftermath. If I did not end it, I would be using my analyst to prevent
the eruption of the trauma and so get no help with it, and risk his dying on me.
My amnesia for that early trauma was not broken through with Winnicott either.
Only recently have I realized that in fact, unwittingly, he altered the whole
nature of the problem by enabling me to reach right back to an ultimate good
mother, and to find her recreated in him in the transference. I discovered later
that he had put me in a position to face what was a double trauma of both
Percy's death and mother's failing me.
As I re-read my records I am astonished at the rapidity with which he went to
the heart of the matter. At the first session I mentioned the amnesia for the
trauma of Percy's death, and felt I had had a radical analysis with Fairbairn of
the 'internalized bad-object defences' I had built up against that, but we had
not got down to what I felt was my basic problem, not the actively bad-object
mother of later childhood, but the earlier mother who failed to relate at all.
Near the end of the session he said: 'I've nothing particular to say yet, but if
I don't say something, you may begin to feel I'm not here'. At the second
session he said: