1 - The Self in Communion

Summary

On 12 March 1953, the widely read BBC magazine, The Listener, published a scathing but unsigned review ([Gorer] 1953) of W. R. D. Fairbairn's Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (Fairbairn 1994e). The book was issued in 1952 by Tavistock Publications, and contained a selection of the author's papers from 1927 to 1951. The review clearly displeased Fairbairn, who, as his personal papers reveal, launched a libel suit against the BBC supported by the Medical Defence Union (Letter, Hempsons Solicitors to Fairbairn, 22 June 1953; Letter, Fairbairn to Hempsons Solicitors [24 June 1953]). This action eventually issued in an out-of-court settlement from the BBC of ￡50 (waived by Fairbairn), his legal costs, and a letter of correction to be published in a later issue of The Listener (Letter, Hempsons Solicitors to Fairbairn, 30 September 1954; Letter, Hempsons Solicitors to Fairbairn, 14 October 1954). Fairbairn's legal case contended that the review attacked his fitness to sit on assessment boards for war pensions: this was plausible, since the review refers to ‘a couple of rather uncharitable notes on war neurotics and the treatment and rehabilitation of sexual offenders’, and states that Fairbairn regards the ‘lapse from group standards’ in such cases as ‘wilful naughtiness’ ([Gorer] 1953).

Fairbairn's irritation almost certainly ran deeper. The review, as he eventually discovered on the psychoanalytic grapevine (Letter, Jock [Sutherland] to Fairbairn, 22 September 1954), was authored by the psychoanalytically informed anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905–85) – an intimation now corroborated by corresponding materials in Gorer's personal papers (Gorer Review). Gorer opened with the question: ‘How many of Freud's concepts of the formation and development of the human psyche can be abandoned without abandoning the rightful use of the term psychoanalysis?’ ([Gorer] 1953). According to Gorer,

Fairbairn rejects nearly every one of Freud's central concepts: libido and the death instinct, the interpretation of dreams as wish-fulfilments, the Oedipus conflict, the theory of zones, the attempted link between psychology and physiology, the concept of guilt, [and] the super-ego as the surrogate of the Oedipus situation. ([Gorer] 1953)