A recent post on this blog, Fairbairn’s Dream Drawings #1, explored the subject of William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn’s dream drawings, which date from the 1950s. The focus of that first post were Fairbairn’s drawings of landscapes. For this return to the subject, I will be focusing on the drawings in which Fairbairn brings to life a cast of interesting characters.

When looking through the drawings in the William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn Archive it becomes immediately apparent that many of the characters in Fairbairn’s dreams made regular appearances. The men, women and children are drawn wearing distinctive clothing or they perform distinctive activities. Some of the recurring characters include a middle-aged women, often in Edwardian looking dress, redolent of Mary Poppins, a child in traditional Scottish dress, often with a dog, and a seated male figure. It is likely that the child represents Fairbairn himself, and the man and woman are perhaps his parents, however, it is not my intention here to offer explanations or interpretations of these characters; I’m sure you will form your own opinions about that.

The female character is often depicted leading the child from a chain around his neck, or brandishing a weapon, typically a sword or stick:

However, on occasion she is portrayed in a slightly less menacing way, such as below.

As with the first image on this post, the image below includes the majority of the pantheon of Fairbairn’s dream characters.

Whilst the majority of the characters in Fairbairn’s dream drawings are recognisable as humans, there are a few that have a more abstract feel. What do you think Fairbairn’s subconscious was trying to tell him here?

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.