Fairbairn’s Dream Drawings #2

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.

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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:

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

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

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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?

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Fairbairn as Student

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Fairbairn Archive Mystery Item of the Month

One of the elements of archival work I have always enjoyed is the opportunity to get to know a collection really intimately. In order to generate intelligible finding aids for researchers, it is important to get a good overview of a collection: to understand how records relate to each other and to learn all that you can about the format, creator, use and date of an item. Luckily, this is often pretty easy but sometimes an item comes along which presents a bit more of a challenge.

Challenging items bring out an archivist’s inner Sherlock Holmes. Minute clues are forensically examined in the hope of cracking the mystery. However, some challenges are easier than others and today I would like to ask for your help with a mystery I have been unable to solve so far.

The item in question is a six-line, rhyming poem on a suitably psychoanalytical theme.

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My familiarity with Ronald Fairbairn’s papers means that I know this item is in his handwriting*. However, I have no real idea as to the author of this poem. Is this an original Fairbairn composition or is it something he merely transcribed?

Knowing the answer to this mystery will be invaluable as it will help to ensure Fairbairn’s papers are catalogued to the highest possible standard. So, can anyone out there help?

*By now, I can read Fairbairn’s hand pretty easily, but just in case it proves a little tricky, here’s a transcription of the poem:

Remember well what Freud hath said-

We want to take our mums to bed.

And, since they always utter “no”,

We feel we’ve nowhere else to go.

Hysteria doth thus emerge

Through failure of the sexual urge.

William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn: an archivist’s perspective

The papers of Edinburgh-based psychoanalyst, William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn (more usually known simply as Ronald) are held here, in the National Library of Scotland.

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I’m Karla, an archivist, and since January 2015 I have been lucky enough to work with Ronald Fairbairn’s papers. So far, I have examined and rearranged the collection and I will soon be working alongside our conservation department who will be ensuring its long-term physical survival. However, the main aim of my six-month, Wellcome Trust funded post is to promote access to, and facilitate use of, this collection, through detailed, online cataloguing. In order to achieve this I have been working with fellow professionals from the University of Edinburgh Library, which is home to Fairbairn’s own library. Our intention is to re-establish the relationships that exist between his papers and his books and to create a website through which both collections can be accessed.

The first three months of this project have been a revelation to me. Ronald Fairbairn’s papers roughly span the period of 1891-1964, a period that I happen to know quite a bit about through other archives I have worked with. However, the documents in this collection have provided me with a new window to this world: one that reveals some of its darker psychological spaces as well as those that are reassuringly familiar.

Fairbairn’s papers have a research interest for a wide variety of mental health professionals and researchers, after all, some of his most important published papers continue to influence psychoanalytical thought today. Much of the collection provides an insight into Fairbairn’s working methodologies and the constantly evolving nature of his research interests.

However, the collection is comprised of a variety of materials – including newspaper cuttings, photographs (such as the one of Ronald Fairbairn, c 1895, below) personal papers and drawings – as well as, occasionally, totally unexpected material.

WRD Fairbairn c 1895

During the remainder of this project I intend to share with you some of the stories you might expect to see but also, many that you won’t! Plus, I also hope you will be able to help me by solving some of the ‘archival mysteries’ I have come across in the past three months.