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.
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.
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.
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.
I was pleased to read about your project and view the amazing images. As a psychiatrist interested in object relations, I find the drawings extremely compatible with Fairbairn’s ideas of endomorfic origin of dreams. His originallity contrasts with freudian concept of dreams as urge realization. In the drawings Fairbairn probably depicts several partial objects and/or the corresponding multiple selves emerging from the splitting process. It’s hard to mention one by one in the drawings, but they may suggest the representations of: the rejecting object; the exciting object; the sabotating self; the excited self, among others. These discriptions of fairbairnian interpretation of dreams emerged from his work with regressed esquizoid patients and from patients accessing regressive content after long period of analysis. In his self analysis, Fairbairn must have been interested in the intriguing content of his own regressive images dreamt while his theory was becoming clear to himself. These drawings reinforce his search for hypothesis through inner observations that were also plausible through an epistemology of clinical findings among his analytic patients. In his ideas, he soon took a different path from oedipal primacy in interpretation and focused on the issue of existance and self formation through the relation to “real objects” in the early years. That’s what the drawings must be all about, as I see.
* My comments also refer to your posting “drawings #2”