Wrye and Welles's project is to show how borderline and other fairly disturbed patients, crippled by some failure in their early developmental lives, perpetuate archaic fantasies and impulses, thereby making intimate bonding seem dangerous. Intimacy becomes frightening either because it poses a threat to their sense of self-cohesion or because it mobilizes destructive impulses against others. The patients' deficits and conflicts reveal themselves during the course of treatment, particularly in the transference and, most of all, through what the authors call