ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

W. R. D. Fairbairn

William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn (WRD Fairbairn for short) was a man who studied how people behave and why they behave the way they do. He was born a long time ago in 1889 in a place called Scotland. He was interested in people's emotions and feelings, especially how they could be affected by things that happened to them when they were kids.

He thought that when people are born, they're like a blank slate - there's nothing inside them yet. But as they grow up and go through different experiences, they start to develop feelings and emotions that shape how they behave. Fairbairn believed that it's important to understand these feelings and emotions in order to understand why people do the things they do.

One thing that Fairbairn was interested in was how people form relationships with other people. He thought that the way we interact with others when we are young affects how we will interact with people later on in life. If we have loving and caring relationships with our parents or caretakers when we're young, we'll be more likely to form healthy relationships later on. But if we don't have those kinds of relationships, we might have a harder time forming good relationships later in life.

Fairbairn also thought that people have different parts of themselves - kind of like different personalities. He called these different parts "ego states". Each ego state has different feelings and emotions, and they can all influence how someone acts. For example, if someone feels angry, that might be coming from their angry ego state. Similarly, if someone feels happy, that might be coming from their happy ego state.

In short, Fairbairn was a man who studied emotions and relationships, and he believed that our experiences when we're young can affect how we behave later on in life. He also believed that people have different parts of themselves that can influence how they act.