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This third major work by Dr. Kavaler-Adler, the Director of the Object Relations Institute (ORI) in New York City, is bristling with the theories and language of the Object Relations perspective in an admirable effort to integrate and further the work of the visionaries of this school of thought. In all honesty it more so succeeds in being an homage to Melanie Klein and Ronald Fairbairn and less so succeeds in interweaving the work of Winnicott, Bion, Kernberg, and Balint to name a few, into the furtherance of the centrality of the mourning process in psychic change. For example, “… Although Balint does not theorize about the interaction of the mourning process and the internalization process, he implies its existence,” and “[though Winnicott] never explicitly dealt with the mourning process…his discussions of early development…are best understood in interaction with a critical mourning process in therapy” (p. 74). Yet despite stretching these theorists beyond their boundaries, there is no question about Dr. Kavaler-Adler's impressive depth of knowledge and profound understanding.
Her main thesis begins with the redefinition of mourning which is traditionally thought of in terms of the funereal grief of bereavement. She transforms it into a lifelong developmental journey of connecting, internalizing, and letting go, thus providing the key experiential factor necessary for true psychic transformations. In this schema those who are able to mourn—that is feel the grief of object loss and the related self-loss which accompanies each surrender of ideal fantasy objects—continue to grow. But those who possess an intolerance to undergo this painful necessary step consequentially suffer from developmental arrests which produce personality blockages in the form of transfixed, repetitive childhood re-enactments that result in self-sabotage and internal states of emptiness. She considers this developmental mourning capacity as a self-integration process in which splits in the ps