Object Love and Reality: An Introduction to a Psychoanalytic Theory of Object Relations.

Today it is generally acknowledged by the behavioral scientist that the study of human behavior requires the cooperation of many disciplines whose investigations contribute to our knowledge of behavior as a final common pathway. In this 167-page book Dr. Modell, a Boston psychoanalyst, has attempted this type of integration in a largely psychoanalytic framework from an historical developmental point of view by using the work of biologists (Lorenz), philosophers (Plato to Kant, Cassirer), physical scientists (Eddington to Kuhn), modern linguists (Chomsky), psychologists (William James), art historians (Gombrich), and mainly psychoanalysts (Freud, Ferenczi, Federn, Nunberg, Winnicott, and others). He has done an excellent job of modifying traditional psychoanalytic theory to fit his clinical observations of the borderline and schizophrenic patients he has studied since 1951. He claims to have avoided any radical departure from Freudian theory by presenting his psychoanalytic theory of object relations