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This book deals with the major contributions to psychoanalysis made by Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott. The first of its six chapters provides a brief history of the British psychoanalytic community, biographical sketches of the principal figures discussed, and some attention to such controversies as that between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Chapter 2 offers further background in the form of a review of some of Freud's main concepts and their historical origins. It breaks no new ground. Chapter 6, the conclusion, recapitulates. The remaining three chapters, devoted to Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott respectively, amount to about three-fourths of the text proper and together constitute the substance of the book. Hughes concentrates, in each instance, on the object relational features of their work, which make up their respective contributions to “reshaping the psychoanalytic domain.”
The author forthrightly announces her purposes. In some of these she succeeds better than in others. She sets out “to chart the course followed” by her principal figures, and tries “to map the steps they actually took” (p. x). Given all the rocks and shoals obstructing her passage through this portion of the psychoanalytic domain, she makes a good job of it on the whole. Along the way she endeavors “to be alert to clinical issues and clinical practice” (p. x), and in that too, she succeeds—admirably, in fact—in part perhaps because of her first-hand familiarity with psychoanalysis as an analysand. The author speaks rather obliquely of her central mission: “I hope to elucidate the strand of psychoanalytic theory which constitutes at once the soundest and most thoroughgoing revision of Freud” (p. ix). Presumably she refers here to object