Object and Self: A Developmental Approach. Essays in Honor of Edith Jacobson. Saul Tuttman, Carol Kaye, and Muriel Zimmerman (Eds.). New York:  International Universities Press, 1981,  xii + 548 pp.

It is pleasant to be able to report that this collection of papers in honor of Edith Jacobson has not lost any of its original freshness and interest despite the usual long delay between publication and review. This series of 21 papers includes essays by an honor roll of contributors to current psychoanalytic theory and practice.

The first five papers by themselves could be a valuable reference work for the student or teacher needing a guide through the intricacies of Dr. Jacobson's work and the complexities of object relations theory. Jacob Arlow's study of the clinical evidence that Jacobson applied to theory building, George Gero's interpretation of her work on depression, and Saul Tuttman's description of the influence of The Self and The Object World on current object relations theory is accompanied by Otto Kernberg's survey of her contributions (this 1979 paper is the only reprinted article in the volume). I found these interpreters and developers of the crucial issues to be very valuable in reviewing my understanding of Jacobson's difficult and sometimes bewilder-ingly complex movement among conflicting theoretical systems. All this is preceded by Dr. Tuttman's “preface”—52 pages of the history of object relations theory from Freud to Mahler. It is evident in these papers, as in those that follow, that one significant honor paid to Dr. Jacobson rests in the willingness to wrestle with and identify the unresolved issues, and the weaknesses as well as the strengths of her work. The concise review by Theodore Dor-pat of the multiple meanings ascribed in the literature to the basic terms of object relations theory brings together the arguments of many analysts about the meanings of the crucial terms.

It is not possible to discuss in detail all the interesting papers that follow. Arnold Goldberg, in “Meaning and Objects,” argues that

The introduction of the concept of the self-object has caused a shift in our understanding to an emphasis on how someone or something i