Splitting in the history of psychoanalysis: from Janet and Freud to Fairbairn, passing through Ferenczi and Suttie

Since his doctoral thesis in 1929, W. R. D. Fairbairn's contribution to psychoanalysis developed as an attempt at integrating P. Janet's and S. Freud's model of the mind. Notwithstanding Fairbairn's pioneering work on Janet and Freud—which was published only in 1994 —it was not until 1970 that the mutual influence between the two was amply discussed in Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious. Far from the cold reception Freud experienced from his professors once he returned from Paris in 1886, Breuer welcomed him back in Vienna "with a warm kiss and embrace". The chapter argues that, although Fairbairn started attempting a theoretical synthesis of the divergences between Janet and Freud, it was not until he read I. D. Suttie's The Origin of Love and Hate, in 1939–1940, that an effective integration was achieved, and this made his theorisation suddenly flourish.