Primitive Internalized Object Relations. Vamik D. Volkan. New York:  International Universities Press, 1976.  vii + 344 pp.

Vamik D. Volkan's first book, Primitive Internalized Object Relations, is a well-written, highly readable study that enriches the psychoanalytic literature in two particularly relevant ways. He adds significantly to the work of contemporary theoreticians such as Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, Harold Searles, and Hyman Spotnitz, who have been attempting to extend the parameters of psychoanalytic theory and technique beyond the Oedipal neurotic to include treatment of people with pre-Oedipal disorders—schizophrenic, borderline, and narcissistic patients. He has made considerable progress toward formulating a theoretical framework to unify classical psychoanalytic drive theory and contemporary object-relations theory. The application of this unified drive/object theory in the treatment of these patients is the major theme of this book. Volkan has relied heavily on the theoretical concepts of Kernberg, while synthesizing his own and Kernberg's thinking with such major ego psychologists as Erikson, Jacobson, Mahler, and major object-relations theorists of the British School such as Bowlby, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Klein, and Winnicott.

Traditional psychoanalytic drive theory sees the urge for expression of libidinal and aggressive energy and the defensive structure built up to regulate the expression of these drives, as the primary factors in personality structure. Object-relations theory stresses the primacy of the infant's attachment to its mother and the subsequent internalization of this object relationship as the essential factor. Kernberg has tried to bridge the gap between these two theoretical positions by holding that the earliest expression of instinctual drive involves an affective interaction with an object and that these drive/affect-tinged object relations, internalized, then become the crucial organizers of all other psychic structures.

Volkan's theory gives us a microscopic view of the primitive ego in the process of formation and development while under the influe