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David Rosenfeld's The Psychotic Aspects of the Personality is a welcome addition to the literature on psychoanalytic approaches to the understanding and treatment of psychosis and near-psychotic conditions. In the foreword, Otto Kernberg describes it as a “general developmental frame of the pathology of internalized object relations in psychosis” (p. xii). He also sees Rosenfeld's attitude to this inquiry as an open-ended one that illuminates “continuities of different types of psychopathology where one would not a priori have suspected them” (p. xiii). These continuities are generously illustrated in ways that reveal the manifestations and operations of primitive defensive organizations and their functions in transference and countertransference processes. These generous clinical pictures of disturbances of internalized object relations in psychosis show a master clinician at work with a variety of conceptual tools and technical approaches to psychoanalytic work.
While it is true that Rosenfeld's frame is open ended and indeed covers the treatment of psychosis and near-psychotic conditions, there is a specific theoretical position upon which he builds his general frame. What specific position can capably subserve his