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These essays, in honor of Edith Jacobson, constitute more a mosaic than an integrated view of critique or the theoretical, clinical, and research issues involved. The effort to be comprehensive and respectful of differences is clearly evident and useful. In such a complex field, the task of a critical review remains inevitably that of each reader. The volume would have benefited from a continuing editorial commentary in the elucidation of the issues and explanatory proposals.
In the historical survey, Tuttman notes the roots of an object-relations theory in Freud: types of object choice, the nature of internalization in depression, mourning and normal development, and the concept of splitting of the ego in fetishism and in the psychoneuroses. He touches on Sandor Ferenczi's therapeutic dyad, Karl Abraham's evolution of object love paralleling the libidinal phases, Federn's views of depersonalization, ego states, and self-feelings. He reviews the contributions of Melanie Klein and the British object-relations school, posing many of the questions about a preverbal archaic phase of development for analysis versus the analysis of a structured personality: the objects real and fantasied in the child's traumatic experiences, the significance of instinct versus relation to objects, the provision of a holding environment versus the interpretation of archaic fantasies and affects. He summarizes the integrative concepts of Erik Erikson, D. W. Winnicott and Margaret Mahler.
The contributions of Edith Jacobson are set forth against this historical backdrop. Tuttman suggests that she provided a unifying developmental schema, an object-relations perspective, to study the origins and qualities of self and object, drawing from clinical experience and existing metapsychology. Jacob Arlow cites her courage and clinical acumen, demonstrated under severe stress in her observation of regression in captivity in Nazi Germany among her fellow captives and her jailers. He notes tha