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This book, dedicated to Margaret Mahler ('independent thinker, researcher, and inspiring teacher'), brings together articles by seventeen authors. There is an enormous range of interests (various points of developmental theory, various questions about clinical theory and intervention) and influences
(S. Freud, Hartmann, Jacobson, Kohut, Winnicott, touches of Klein), but all authors owe an intellectual debt to Mahler's opus on the development of object constancy. Reading this volume thus provides a window on the history of a psychoanlaytic idea—its extensions, revisions, applications, and ritualizations. The diversity of voices requires a liberal allotment of time for reading and critiquing.
The first piece is, appropriately, McDevitt & Mahler's 1980 article, 'Object constancy, individuality, and internalization'. They summarize their developmental schema and clarify a commonly confused point: why they place the attainment of object constancy in the third year of life, later than many developmentalists. To this end, they contrast two concepts, 'the representational world' and 'the internal world'. The representational world is an intrapsychic map of the external world. Within this descriptive/cognitive framework one can question at what point a child demonstrates an ability to evoke the image of his mother. The internal world, by contrast, refers to the organization of intrapsychic structures to accomplish dynamic imperatives. Within this framework one can ask when a child is able to evoke an image of his mother which functions successfully to mitigate anxiety about being on his own. Choosing the latter framework, McDevitt & Mahler highlight the rapprochement crisis in the third year as the experiential cauldron within which this dynamic version of object constancy is forged. (To illustrate for a moment the challenge of this collection, jump ahead to Sandler's 'Comments on the self and its objects', only to