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The great value of this book lies in the fact that it is a well-researched piece of work by a professor of history, who ends her preface by thanking her analyst. It has the virtues of a view of psychoanalysis from outside as well as of sympathetic understanding.
The explicit aim is twofold: to make clinicians in the United States and elsewhere who have a piecemeal knowledge of British object-relations theory appreciate its internal coherence, and also to establish such coherence in the work of the three authors named in the title, 'which constitutes … the soundest and the most thoroughgoing revision of Freud'. The book will therefore be read rather differently by British psychoanalysts and by others. Others will ask if it describes a convincing and useful 'revision of Freud'; in Britain it will be examined by the different groups for whether it gives an accurate and fair account of the theories and clinical work of the authors and whether it does establish a coherence between them.
Since the book was already launched when Jay Greenberg & Stephen Mitchell's Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory was published in 1983, it has been at least six years a-making. Considering the enormous number of books and papers cited in the Bibliography, valuable in itself, of over 30 pages and over 700 items, this is not a long time. Those sources have been supplemented by tape-recordings and interviews made in Britain, as relevant evidence of what the author-theorists 'themselves thought they were doing'. So those interviewed were people who had greater or less personal knowledge of Klein, Fairbairn, or Winnicott and of their work and writings. The material so gained was accumulated over a rather brief time; such journalism, like rescue-archaeology, is a valuable way of recording facts from sources which are soon about to perish or to be destroyed, but, unlike rescue-archaeology, it is sometimes correctable from the same or other sources.
One item here that is in urgent need