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Coming as they do from a dedicated exponent of the work of Melanie Klein, the papers in this wide-ranging collection invariably hew to the Kleinian perspective. And there's the rub. Doing justice to the strengths of Segal's writing will require a certain willing suspension of disbelief in the absolute validity of major Kleinian formulations—by many if not most members of the psychoanalytic community. One may value Klein's enormous contribution to psychoanalysis without subscribing to her metapsychology. Thus it is that while I cannot avoid raising questions about some of Segal's premises, my primary intention is to emphasize the usefulness of what she writes for someone, let us say, who takes a significantly different yet predominately object-relational view of human affairs.
The task of weighing theoretical orientations in pursuit of the practical gain of negotiating a working alliance with this volume might begin with a passage that paints in broad strokes a picture of the analytic process that few would disagree with:
Patients come to us with their internal world structured in a particular way. As the transference develops they project their internal objects and parts of themselves onto us in a way which reveals the object relationships, anxieties, and defences underlying the structure of their personality; the
Page 304situation becomes dynamic again, and we discover the early infantile conflicts and object relationships which led to the creation of those particular structures. (p. 64)
If one takes this passage as representing common ground, departures from that commonality begin when one encounters such pronouncements as “I contend that the basic internal conflict is between the life and the death instincts” (p. 39). The first paper in this collection endeavors to substantiate the clinical usefulness of the death instinct. One may ask whether this concept sufficiently approximates behavioral reality and if relying on it tends to obscure the relational sources of aggressi