According to the author's preface, this book is a summing up of his forty-five years of clinical teaching experience (p. xi). As such, he offers the reader a view of the way a modern-day classical Freudian analyst thinks and works. Chessick is unhappy with much of the recent psychoanalytic literature, which he feels does not modify and correct Freud's paradigm, but tends to replace it entirely. He sees this as a mistake, and thinks that “we should retain Freud's basic ideas as our central paradigm and starting point” (p. xii).

For Chessick, everything in the mind and even in character formation is a compromise between drives and repressing forces. He is especially critical of interpersonal and intersubjective theory. Despite the fact that he writes in a most scholarly fashion and is very conversant with the literature, he seems to misunderstand current inter-subjectivity theory as put forward by Levine and Friedman (2000).