This book brings together various papers published between 1985-91 and adapted for this volume. Kernberg attempts to integrate new developments in theory and the work of clinical practice with severely regressed clients.

The first chapters set the context of the author's ideas. Kernberg proposes modifying but not abandoning Freud's drive theory. His principal modification is to suggest that psychoanalysis recognises the fundamental role of affects in the organisation of drives and in binding together the neuropsychological determinants of affects with the earliest interpersonal experiences of infancy and childhood as determinants of personality formation. Underpinning all his work is the object relations view that