Levine's short volume elucidates a psychoanalytic approach that is nothing less than a paradigm shift. The very nature of our psychoanalytic endeavor is recast in this collection of Levine's writings, in that he directs our attention to the idea that much of psychic development can be understood by examining representation and its vicissitudes, and that attention to the functioning and dysfunctioning of the representational process is especially important in the treatment of patients whose difficulties lie beyond neurosis. He moves elegantly between models, referencing the classical metaphor of archeology but emphasizing a more contemporary metaphor of transformation/construction to represent the psychoanalytic work with nonneurotic patients. The primary focus in this book is on the patient who through developmental trauma, both episodic and cumulative, manifests weakness in psychical representation in such symptoms as affect storms, somatic illness, and structural failures in the capacity for thought.