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.