Troubled persons entering psychoanalysis depend on their analysts to maintain their analytic position through thick and thin…. Although analysands often seem to throw obstacles in the way of analysis, they do hope that their analysts will stand fast. (p. xi)

With this opening sentence, Roy Schafer introduces a subject that is as simple and complex as the title of this book: the all-too-common yet most difficult of clinical problems, namely the ‘bad feelings’ that arise for myriad reasons in our patients. The fact is that, for many people, the closest they can get to verbalizing their emotional state is ‘I feel bad; I feel like shit’. Where do we go from there?

It is apparent to most practitioners that ‘I feel bad; I feel like shit’ is no simple expression of ‘badness’ but covers a vast range of topics including joylessness; disappointment and disappointedness; shame, humiliation and mortification; envy; defences against goodness; termination; false depressive