Abstract

I compare W. R. D. Fairbairn's object relations psychology to an untended garden. It is a garden rich in potential but uncultivated and with a harvest abundant largely in pathology. I am interested in harvesting the metaphysical and ethical implications of the theory. My study is a continuation of a project originated by Browning who investigated the religio-ethical horizons of a number of the modern psychotherapeutic psychologies. Once revealed, the philosophical and spiritual aspects of these psychologies were joined in a critical conversation with other ethical and religious systems. In contrast to Browning's illustrative method, I will employ the virtue ethics used by Bourke , Hauerwas and MacIntyre , and the theological rubric of sanctification used by Hauerwas to engage object relations in a similar conversation. Moreover, to assist in the tending of Fairbairn's garden I will call on the nourishing personal-relations philosophy of John Macmurray. Macmurray, who shared many of the same interpersonal themes as Fairbairn, developed a set of ideas regarding the relational-orientation of man and the personal nature of the universe which have significance for a broader, deeper appreciation of object relations. I hope to demonstrate that though narrow and schematic, Fairbairn's psychology, under the proper conditions, can provide a cornucopia of relationally-based ethical and theological sustenance. This study then turns from object relations' theoretical past to some of its current practitioners. Interviewing twelve contemporary object relational psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, I attempt to elicit and ascertain their understandings of the theory and its religio-ethical dimensions. Their observations are analyzed using the narrative method of psychological research, as seen in Kvale and Polkinghorne