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The author declares the purpose of his book to be a clarification of the meaning of the “plethora” of terms and ideas pertaining to “mental objects,” a phrase of his own coinage referring to what are more commonly called simply “objects.” He specifies that members of this group include object images, internal objects, part-objects, object representations, introjects, identifications, transitional objects, selfobjects, and what he calls “psychic presences.” He indicates the scope of his study to be limited to “mental objects” and not to include “their real-life correlates in external reality” (p. 113). While Perlow insists on the phrase “mental object,” which is curious in that reference to the mental correlates of “object” is almost universally taken for granted, he nevertheless not infrequently does use the term “object” without any prefix in a sense that includes the idea of object representations of aspects of real persons. On such occasions, as well as on many others, he may be seen as repeatedly failing to keep the metapsychological material of his book as far removed as he seems to wish he could from real-life circumstances.
Well aware of the great diversity of opinion in object relations theory, Perlow claims impartiality—at least as far as his book is concerned: “No attempt was made to prefer one approach to another” (p. 165), his aim being to map conceptual differences and the contexts that account for them. Thus the book has a purpose but