Fairbairn's Analytic Situation
In Fairbaim's understanding of the analytic situation, the patient, although searching hopefully for something new, inevitably experiences the analyst (in the transference) as an old, bad object. The basic assumptions and prototypes of human connection established in the past and preserved in internal object relations shape the experience with the analyst. If the analyst isn't experienced through old patterns, the analyst isn't important, and the analysis isn't deeply engaged. Yet if the analyst is experienced solely in terms of old, unsatisfying relationships, how can anything new happen?
For Freud, it was insight that set the analysand free. She comes to understand that the pleasure she unconsciously pursues in her infantile strivings is not possible. The reality principle gains dominance over the pleasure principle, and the doomed longings of early childhood are renounced.
For Fairbairn, it is not unconscious pleasure-seeking that imprisons the analysand in neurosis; the neurosis embodies the only forms of relation with others the analysand believes in. She feels connected to others, both in the real world and to the presences in her inner world, only through painful states of mind and self-defeating patterns of behavior. She is convinced that renouncing these painful states and old patterns would lead to total isolation, abandonment, annihilation. Insight is not enough. Insight alone doesn't allow the analysand to realize the impossibility of her neurotic strivings; she can't imagine being herself without them. According to Fairbairn, no one
can give up powerful, addictive ties to old objects unless she believes that new objects are possible, that there is another way to relate to others in which she will feel seen and touched. For the analysand to renounce the old, transferential forms of connection to the analyst, she must begin to believe in new, less constrained patterns of relatedness.Fairbairn didn't spell out the processes through which the patient begins to experience the analyst as a different sort of object. Some authors (e.g., Racker) argue that the very act of providing interpretations makes the analyst a different sort of object. Others (e.g., Winnicott) argue that it is not the interpretations but the analytic "frame," the reliable structure within which the analysis takes place, that makes the analyst a new object. Whatever the mechanism, Fairbairn located analytic change not in the dawning of insight, but in a changed capacity for relatedness, an ability to connect with the analyst in new ways.
A middle-aged woman whose family was structured around patterns of male dominance and female submission tended to use her relationships in general and her analytic sessions in particular as opportunities for ritual humiliation. Paula would recount her failings, her incompetencies, her hopelessness in a manner which, many years ago, would provoke her father to take her over, crushing and protecting her in the same gesture. She was certain the analyst regarded her with enormous contempt, and she felt ashamed of her deep inadequacies, which she believed it was necessary to expose and document.
Several years into the work, Paula spoke of the kind of experience Fairbairn regarded as central to analytic change. She had been preparing her financial records for her accountant and discovered that she had made more money the previous year than she had ever imagined possible. She reported a flickering good feeling followed by a tremendous surge of
depression and hopelessness about the increased taxes she would now have to pay. The analyst encouraged her to describe her experience of the two states. When she felt more powerful in her earning capacity, she quickly experienced a sense of being "all alone out there," somehow isolated, unattached, undesirable. She couldn't imagine the analyst feeling anything warm or deep toward her as competent and productive and imagined her treatment ending abruptly. As she plummeted into her familiar depressed and abashed state, Paula felt somehow more connected, more protected.The analyst would feel sorry for her and keep her around. Ironically, the more powerful she was, the more endangered she felt. It is only in living through such moments in the analytic relationship, moments that stand outside old patterns, containing states of mind that are "out of character," that the patient gradually begins to believe in and become able to commit herself to new modes of relatedness.
Toward the end of her analysis, Paula described a sense of herself as being like a jungle cat in a cage whose door stood open. She could see how her old forms of organizing her experiences and relationships constrained her and could sense the possibility of stepping outside them into a greater freedom. Yet her cage provided her with a safety, even if illusory, that was hard to give up. She paced back and forth, back and forth, feeling powerful but self-restrained. She could not leave until she felt that her exit would not result in a precipitous plunge; until she could believe that there was firm footing (other modes of relating) beyond the door of the cage and not an abyss.
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