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The inspiration for much of the theorizing in the book comes from the author's experience over several years in leading groups composed of pregnant women, as well as her own pregnancies. This book is an expansion of the ideas presented in her 2002 award-winning paper, “The Object Within: Childbirth as a Developmental Milestone.” Although the press materials tout this as a book based on Drive Theory, it is not. I think this description does the work a disservice, as many clinicians believe that Drive Theory is more of historical interest than clinically useful. It is a book about the internal object relationships that are crucial to female development. It chronicles the changes of these internalized object relationships through the major events of the female life cycle, with a major emphasis on the changes during reproduction.
Holmes' major thesis is that the woman uses the introjected imagos of mother, father, and fantasied self, as well as the internalized relationships among these imagos, as a vehicle for separating from the overly powerful early objects. In her theorizing, she proposes that the internalized triangular relationship (which is the Internal Triangle of the title) is used “the way the boy uses the penis” to separate and gain mastery over the archaic introjects.
I would give the author greater license than she claims: I would say that the great strength of her contribution is to remind us that fathers also internalize their own mothers. Thus paternal introjects contain responses to archaic mothers and maternal introjects contain responses to archaic fathers. It is not simply the actual parents and their historical deeds that are important, but the quality of the interactions and responses of these figures within the child's sphere. And this developmental constellation can apply equally to boys and girls, to men and women. Although men do not carry the offspring within their own bodies, they carry internalized introjects of parents, siblings, and ultimate