Essay on Some Clinical Reflections on Early Mentation in Klein and Winnicott: The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic Clinical Essays On Psychic Survival-of-the-Object. By Jan Abram. New York:  Routledge, 2022,  210 pp., $42.95 hardcover.

Jan Abram is well known for her contributions to Winnicott studies.1 This book is a compilation of thoughts that she has developed over roughly the past two decades, in various talks and papers (which constitute the chapters of the book), on what she calls the “surviving” and “non surviving” objects. In this volume, Abram applies these concepts to all stages of early development elucidated by Winnicott; as she states in the preface:

Further elaborations permeate the chapters of this book towards an amplification and extension of Winnicott's paradigm: the incommunicado self; violation of the self and the paradox of communication; terror at the roots of non survival; an implicit theory of desire; the fear of WOMAN underlying misogyny; the meaning of infantile sexuality; the father in the nursing mother's mind as an integrate in the nascent psyche; formlessness preceding integration; a theory of madness; and psychic survival-of-the-object.

In this essay, I will first provide overall comments on Abram's book and then use these as a springboard to offer some comparative clinical reflections on Winnicott's and Klein's theories of early development/mentation. Winnicott's theories form a central feature of this book, and the author's clinical work—which she illustrates at length throughout—is almost exclusively, if not solely, based upon them.

The author takes off from Winnicott's emphasis on the “the survival of the object,” introduced toward the end of his life in his paper “The Use

of the Object” (Winnicott 1969), and extends this concept, as noted above, to all stages of development as Winnicott theorized them. For Abram, the survival of the object is relevant to each developmental stage of