Critical Notice

VOLKAN, VAMIK D. Primitive internalised object relations. New York,  International Universities Press, 1976,  xxiii + 344.

In recent years an enormous amount of work has been done by analysts of different schools in attempts to reconstruct the earliest stages of infant development. The approaches have been made from many different positions—child analysis, infant and mother observation and the analysis of adult patients, and as a result there has been overlap and confusion in terminology. Dr Volkan is an American psychoanalyst and ego psychologist whose work has been particularly with psychotic, borderline, and narcissistic patients, and in this book he presents and discusses the primitive object relations which they show, and which have become reactivated in the treatment situation. There are chapters which deal with internalised object relations, internalisations and the ‘analytic introject’, primitive splitting and introjective-projective relatedness and emotional flooding and the accompanying mother activities. The transitional object, transitional phantasies and the analysis of narcissistic personalities are topics on which he brings together the theoretical views of a number of psychoanalysts, Winnicott, Modell, Fintzy and Searles, with his own in an interesting synthesis.

Throughout the book, Volkan takes as a framework of reference Otto Kernberg's description and separation of the earliest internalisations of object realations into four main stages, stating that stages II and III are the ones that emerge in the clinical material he is presenting.

Stage I is the phase of autism, and takes from the first four to twelve weeks, when the primary undifferentiated self-object constellation has not yet been established. Kernberg believes that there are memory traces of pleasurable and unpleasurable sensory experiences, and the beginning of differentiation between the ‘all good’ and the ‘all bad’ in the interaction with the mother. If there is a failure in the maternal fa