Monthly Archives: April 2015

Fairbairn Archive Unexpected Item of the Month

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One of the great pleasures of working with archives is the propensity they have to surprise. Hidden amongst the vast records of organisations, or the more petite collections of individuals, you are almost guaranteed to stumble upon something you would never have imagined to find. Items such as these help to add colour to the picture extant records create of the people who have left them, and they add colour to the world they occupied.

There are quite a few such items in the W Ronald D Fairbairn Archive. These items help to support the evidence we have of the wide-ranging interests Fairbairn had, both within and without the world of psychoanalysis. For example, at university he studied philosophy, theology and Hellenic studies, before embarking upon his medical qualifications and he was a member of a number of societies including the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society.

A small, yellowing newspaper cutting from 1932, in the Fairbairn Archive, holds the distinction of telling one of the most unusual stories I have ever come across in the ten years I have worked with archives.

Newspaper cutting

This macabre and disturbing incident is shocking to read but, unfortunately perhaps, the journalistic style of the time renders it mildly humorous too.

It is obvious why this story would have interested Fairbairn: the unexpected nature of this cutting is that the event happened at all.

Fairbairn as Student

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In the academic year 1907/8, the 17 year old WRD Fairbairn matriculated to study in the Arts Faculty at the University of Edinburgh.  This followed 11 years schooling at Merchiston Castle (6 in Preparatory and 5 in the Upper School), gaining a leaving certificate comprising English, Latin, Greek, French and Mathematics. He continued both Latin and Greek during his first year of study at university, and took on Zoology as a third subject.  Subsequent years comprised courses in Logic, Moral Philosophy, Advanced Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, Advanced Logic and Greek Philosophy.

In 1918, at the age of 29, Fairbairn returned to Higher Education. This time, he enrolled to study in the Faculty of Medicine.  Part of the intervening period had included war service.  The Roll of Honour records that he had served in the Merchiston Castle Officer Training Corps while a pupil there and that he had served in the OTC Engineers between May and November 1915 as a cadet. From November 1915, he was 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery (Territorial), achieving Lieutenant the following year.

Fairbairn's signature, taken from his graduation record

He graduated MBChB in 1923.  His marks show strengths in some areas and perhaps a lower ability in others.

View Fairbairn’s full graduation record (pdf)

He continued his studies and achieved his MD in 1926, his thesis being Relationship of dissociation and repression considered from the point of view of medical psychology.

View his MD Thesis (external link)

Fairbairn’s Dream Drawings #1

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The composition of the Fairbairn Archive is rich, with a wide variety of materials from manuscripts to typescripts and photographs to correspondence. However, amongst the most striking of all the documents are a collection of dream drawings, made by Ronald Fairbairn in the 1950s.

Dreams have an important role to play when it comes to psychoanalysis. Alongside the exploration of fantasy and free-association, dreams offer analysts a means to gain insight into a patient’s symptoms and problems. Fairbairn made use of this technique when working with his own patients, but as these drawings reveal, he was also keen to record and analyse his own dreams.

That Fairbairn would be open to such self-analysis is no real surprise. Practitioners of Fairbairn’s generation were expected to undergo analysis as part of their training and in 1921, Fairbairn went into treatment with the analyst, E. H. Connell. With his obvious interest in the human psyche, understanding himself would be yet another means of furthering his knowledge of this complex subject.

Fairbairn’s dream drawings are, typically, simple line-drawings in pen, on lined paper. They give the impression of being made in haste, made as an aide-memoir rather than for any artistic purposes. There are recurring themes, recurring characters but much of the meaning is obscure and difficult to interpret.

For my first visit to this subject I have chosen a selection of images united by their depiction of landscape.

landscape 3
Symbols of hills, valleys, coasts and water, as seen above, are recurrent in Fairbairn’s dream drawings, particularly those made in October, 1950.

They are often devoid of people, although there are occasional exceptions, such as the drawing below.

landscape 5

And although most of the dream drawings depict plausible scenarios, there are occasional forays into the world of the supernatural, or at least the unusual, such as in the drawing below.

landscape 4

These drawings offer an extremely intimate window into the mind of Ronald Fairbairn. Researchers of archives most often need to make inferences from the documentary remains in order to be able to get this close to their subjects. The Fairbairn Archive is special because material of this nature is tantalisingly accessible, even if it does require a sophisticated degree of interpretation.