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Margot Waddell's Inside Lives succeeds admirably in placing Kleinian theory in a developmental context. In doing so, it gives Kleinian theory an interpersonal dimension that renders ideas often useful in understanding our patients even more useful in the actual clinical interchange. For instance, Waddell's reconceptualizing the Kleinian positions as states of mind captures the experience of fluidity and the representational subtleties of each of the positions as they occur at various times in the transference and countertransference. Given the rapid and shifting states of mind that characterize the transference, it is jarring to have the analyst's experience represented by a verbal symbol—the word position—that is out of sync with its actuality. This may seem a small point, but calling something a state of mind rather than a position is very helpful in thinking more subtly about our experience and thereby avoiding either/or judgments.
Waddell's description of the holding function is another example of her skill in lending an interpersonal resonance to abstract ideas. She describes an adult caregiver who is capable of discerning which aspect of the child's self happens to be in charge of the whole self at a given time as providing that child an experience of holding the self and its parts together. This conveys to me the experience of being held that is felt by a patient whose analyst keeps to the immediate circumstances of the transference and relates the particular aspect of the self now in ascendance to the internal dynamics that have resulted in that aspect's taking charge.
I would like to direct the reader's attention also to the chapter on models of learning, where Waddell relates Klein's views on learning to those of Bion and places both in an interpersonal context. The distinction between having knowledge and learning that is motivated