Winston Churchill once said, "The United States and Great Britain are two great democracies divided by a common language. "This 'Tower of Babel' motif is apparent today in the United States in the debate between ego psy- chology and self psychology and between the British school of object rela- tions and the American version of object relations, that of ego psychology's representational world. Dr. Hamilton has taken upon himself the task of in- tegrating these disparate lines of thinking and of reconciling them with cur- rent developmental concepts. He moves gracefully and accurately through Freud, Klein, Erikson, Hartmann, Bion, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Kohut, Tolpin, Kemberg, and particularly Mahler. He employs these and many other key contributors in order to develop the thesis of the overarching im- portance that object relations, including Kohut's selfobject functions, Kern- berg's affective self-object units, Klein's internal objects, and Jacobson'sob- ject representations, has for the development of the self.

"The fact that his formative training took place at the Menninger Founda- tion gives an even deeper perspective to this book. It was there that ego psychologists from the United States met classical analysts from central Europe, Kleinian analysts from South America, and Middle school analysts from Great Britain. It was also there that analytic ideas were seriously and methodically studied in psychotics, borderlines, and narcissistic disorders. It was here also that analytic group psychology, including the Tavistock method of Bion's, was put into operation. With all this as his backdrop, Dr. Hamilton takes us on an object-relations guided tour through psychosis, borderline conditions, narcissistic personality disorders, neuroses, group phenomena, and mythology, integrating each step of the journey with developmental signposts.

"This book best approximates what every psychiatric resident, clinical psychologist, psychiatric social worker, and analytic institute candidate would have wished for. It is an extraordinary handbook of the new developmental psychologies of psychoanalysis