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For the past 50 years, John Watkins has been exploring what he has come to call “ego states.” In this book, he and Helen Watkins, his wife and collaborator, explicate their theory of ego states, and its therapeutic implications. He was analyzed by Edoardo Weiss, who was in turn analyzed by Paul Federn. The Watkins trace their theory to Federn's concept of ego states, although they acknowledge that they have given this term new meanings. John Watkins states that most of his own clinical work has been with multiple personality disorder (MPD or dissociative identity disorder), whereas Helen Watkins' clinical practice consists mostly of non-MPD mental health professionals, who see her for “marathon” series of 10 to 15 hours of sessions over the course of one weekend. The Watkins contend that multiplicity exists on a continuum, and their concept of ego states refers to a broad category that encompasses not only the alters of patients with full-fledged MPD, but also analogous intrapsychic structures in less disturbed patients, and even in “normal” individuals. Thus, those of you who doubt the existence of MPD will probably be put off by this book, even though the book is not primarily about MPD. The rest of you may have mixed reactions to the book, as I did myself. The notion of a continuum from the more normal to the more pathological is inherently appealing. It is almost second nature for analysts to assume that a given form of pathology can exist on a spectrum, with “normality” at one end and the most severe instances of this pathology at the opposite end. The October 1996 issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, for example, published papers from a symposium on “multiplicity” that applied that concept to patients with neurotic, rather than frankly dissociative disorders. However, Frank Putnam, one of the leading authorities on dissociative disorders, recently reported the results of a study that contradicted the continuum model of dissociation (Putnam et al., 1996). When