The Concept of Anxiety within an Object Relations Perspective

In a paper submitted to the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1943, Ronald Fairbairn, the Edinburgh based psychoanalyst wrote Freud's libidio theory has remained relatively unquestioned. This is a situation which I have come to regard as most regrettable ... In my opinion it is high time that psychopathological inquiry which in the past has been successively focused first upon impulse and later upon the ego should now be focused upon the object toward which impulse is directed.…