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This book is a collection of clinical papers given by Riesenberg Malcolm, mostly at psychoanalytic conferences and symposia over the period 1970 to l998. Some of these papers have not been published before and some have been updated. They are a remarkable series of papers, noteworthy for their clarity on what many analysts are concerned with today: the complex issue of the positions of mutual influence in the consulting-room — the ways in which the patient through projective identification exerts a subtle pressure on the analyst to recreate early object relations and the manner in which the analyst as a recipient of these projections is inevitably drawn into this in some way, and under these pressures is ‘recruited’ to enact something of the patient's disturbing primitive object relations. She elucidates these aspects of the analytic situation with alive and authentic clinical material, showing how she, as analyst, had to struggle to contain the projections and to experience the emotional disturbance while sustaining, or indeed recovering, a capacity for reflective thought by working through the countertransference and transference experience. She illustrates this vividly, in eleven papers, where she shows a deep sensitivity to her patients’ often-unbearable projections, and an enormous capacity to find the words which really capture the uncertainties, depth and complexity of the archaic enactments in the transference. This she does on the basis of a working model in her mind based on the theories of Klein, Bion, particularly his theory of reversible perspective, Rosenfeld, Joseph, and her concept of the total transference, Steiner, and his concept of psychic retreats, as well as other contemporary Kleinians.
The book is divided into three sections grouped by subject. There is an excellent introduction to each by Priscilla Roth. The first section is devoted to ‘the internal world in the transference’, and focuses on splitting and projection. Riesenberg Malcolm shows