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By Victoria Hamilton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, xi + 313 pp., $25.00.
The author contends that relatedness to objects, in some sense perceived as such, characterizes the human infant almost from the start. Narcissus is not a story about our earliest condition, but about that condition gone wrong. Though our adult conceptions of reality are derived—in particular from our earliest real interactions with others—neither relatedness to the world nor the desire to know it is rooted in some more basic condition or instinct. Oedipus is not a story about the sexual origins of curiosity, but about the tragedy of knowledge withheld.
These are claims with a dual nature: philosophic as well as psychoanalytic. Trained as a philosopher before she became a psychoanalyst, Hamilton treats the themes common to these two disciplines with originality and sophistication. And the alternation between clinical vignette and theoretical discussion give a welcome vividness to the latter.
Instead of dividing psychoanalytic theories into those which are "Freudian" and those which are "object-relational," as she calls them, she invites us to draw the fundamental distinction between theories of development that posit a primary state of isolation or union, on the one hand, and those that posit, on the other, an original diversity or duality. She maps psychoanalytic theories in the following way (p. 28): "Primary Narcissism or Mother-Infant Fusion/Union (Freud, Mahler, Kohut)"; "Primary Internal Object-Relations (Klein, Kernberg, Rosenfeld)"; "Intense Relatedness (Balint) or Primary Affectional Bond (Bowlby et al.)"; "Interactional Synchrony (Bower, Brazelton) or Mutuality (Winnicott)."
Using as her basis the work of attachment, interactional, some object-relation theorists (notably Winnicott), and Gregory Bateson's