Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena: By Vamik D. Volkan. New York: International Universities Press, 1981, 398 pp., $32.50.

With this book Volkan makes useful contributions to theoretically understanding and clinically approaching pathological grief. He has studied the subject intensively for 15 years, treating 150 pathologically grieving patients, most in brief or prolonged intensive psychotherapy, a few in psychoanalysis. A number of colleagues have joined him in this study; some of their cases are used along with his for illustrations. A succinct review of what is already known and thought about grief reactions is presented as a prelude to his own findings and thoughts about the subject.

Volkan conceives his patients to be neurotic and precisely delineates two forms of their abnormal grief. One is "reactive depression," which corresponds with Freud's description of melancholia. It is characterized by a disruptive identification with an ambivalently regarded lost object. This mobilizes a sadistic superego, which results in both loving and hating, wanting both to preserve and to destroy the self as identified with the deceased. The other form of aberrant grief Volkan terms "established pathological mourning." It does not involve pathological identification. Instead, in this condition the patient attempts to retain a vivid positive tie to the lost object, albeit with some ambivalence, through formation of a loved and loving introject along with use of "linking objects." Linking objects are various tangible items associated in some way with the deceased person—perhaps an item that belonged to him, a photograph, or something symbolic of the event of his death. "Linking phenomena" are parallel but intangible means of preserving an illusion of contact with the deceased; special songs and repetitive fantasies would be examples. In the closing chapter, linking objects and phenomena are differentiated from transitional objects and fetishes.

Volkan's primary contribution is to the understanding and treatment