An attempt has been made to direct attention to the specificity of limit-setting with patients of varying degrees of ego modification. Each analytic patient demonstrates, through the nature of his inability to adhere rigidly to the analytic contract, the nature and degree of ego modification with which he is handicapped. The behaviour which demonstrates this ego modification is the indirect expression of a need for a specific ego identification which the analyst is in a position to supply through careful realistic behaviour. Common to all these patients is some disturbance in perception and some failure of an executant function of the ego. Finally, such limit-setting, while it varies greatly in degree from one case to the other, is not a variation in psycho-analytic technique in kind, but only in degree.