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The author holds that, broadly speaking, the focus of interest of psychoanalysis in the course of its history has gradually shifted from symptoms and dreams and their unconscious meanings and determinants, to the analysis of character, resistance, ego defenses, and, more recently, to the problem of object relations. 'The area of clinical experience that awaits better conceptualization is that of disturbed human object relationships. What is needed is a model
that would better conceptualize the ego's relationship to the environment and would encompass progressive and regressive alterations in object relations' (p. 125). He feels that the contributions of many contemporary analysts have prepared the groundwork for a unified theory of object relations, singling out in his preface such authors as Winnicott, Hartmann, Jacobson, Erikson, and Hendrick.
In order to approach a better conceptualization of the ego's relationship to the environment, Modell begins with a consideration of certain manifestations of the mental life of primitives by exploring aspects of paleolithic art in their bearing on the problem of magical and mythical thought and the original identity of 'image' and 'thing'. He goes on to consider Winnicott's concept and description of transitional objects and transitional phenomena, since these represent a stage between identificatory and object-cathecting processes—an intermediate stage in the formation of objects and self as distinct from each other. The development of the sense of identity (i.e., identity of the self) and of the acceptance of separateness is a crucial—in a sense the final—step in the progression from a magical, identificatory reality structure (where subject and object are not separate entities) to reality as divided into an inner world and an outer world of objects. Throughout the book frequent reference is made to clinical observations of psychotic and borderline patients as they lend themselves, more than neurotics, to the study