You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Joseph and Anne-Marie Sandler, in the preface to this comprehensive, yet succinct and clearly written book, state what they wish to accomplish:
While the chapters still retain much of the quality of the original papers on which they are based, we nevertheless hope that the work we have put together into this book provides a theoretical basis for integrating a theory of internal object relations into an ego-psychological—or, more properly, a post-ego-psychological—frame of reference, taking what is appropriate from our own clinical experience and from object relational and Kleinian theory while trying to avoid simplistic formulations. [pp. xi-xii]
Their tone in this passage is characteristically modest, but I believe they have succeeded admirably. In one hundred forty pages of text, they construct a virtual textbook of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. There are knowledgeable and respectful roots in Freud, Anna Freud, and classical theory, but also forthright competence with current ego-psychological, developmental, and object-relational (mostly Kleinian) ideas. Late-breaking developmental research and cognitive science are not slighted. Lively clinical examples throughout illustrate how the authors' theory directly links to their practice of psychoanalysis. Abstruseness is at a minimum. Their theory is experience-near.
As Otto Kernberg notes in his respectful foreword, the Sandlers' methodology is to use theoretical building blocks—topics taken from contemporary theory. Each topic is carefully considered step by step, then gradually integrated into a unified whole. The book is far more