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The parallel juxtapositions in this title—interpreting and holding: paternal and maternal—are intriguing. Can quintessential maternal and paternal functions be discerned and parceled into equally discernible therapeutic interactions? We are accustomed to the signification,
to borrow a deconstructionist term, of mother and father as irreducible imagoes that resonate to antiquity. But with respect to an individual's developmental history, what we consider maternal and paternal function may not be gender specific, especially in an era of relatively relaxed role definition.
Nevertheless, the depth and persistence of bipartite representation is evident in a ready extension to psychological concepts. As easily as a fork and knife pair can be identified as respectively maternal and paternal, a long list of categorical associations to maternal-paternal can be generated from the psychological lexicon: preoedipal-oedipal, fusion-autonomy, attachment-separation, deficit-conflict, self-other, internal-external, dyadic-triadic, being-doing, shame-guilt, envy-jealousy, play-work, and splitting-repression, as well as holding-interpreting. Furthermore, in our genealogy, Freud is father, and Winnicott, via Abraham, Melanie Klein and the British School, is mother. Although I have been liberal with metaphor, these distinctions are more than mental parlor tricks. They underlie the central controversies in contemporary psychoanalytic theory which constitute the thesis of Jeffrey Seinfeld's present contribution.
Like many recent works, Interpreting and Holding is a treatise on object relations. Unlike many other authors, Seinfeld explicitly attempts to show how an object relations perspective dovetails with neoclassical psychoanalytic understandings of therapeutic process in day-to-day clinical work. Dr. Seinfeld, a psychotherapist and Associate Professor at New York University's School of Social Work, is the author of two previous clinically oriented books on object relations (1990, 199