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There are important and original things in this book. In 1963 Dr Modell published in this Journal a paper, 'Primitive Object Relationships and the Predisposition to Schizophrenia', in which he distinguished a group of borderline patients, in the treatment (and in the supervision of the treatment) of which he has specialized; he distinguished them from patients exhibiting the major schizophrenias by their maintaining ties with external objects but from neurotic patients by the predominantly transitional (Winnicott's term) nature of their object-relationships and therefore of their transferences. From here Dr Modell has gone on to see that 'the theory of object-relations, that is, love-relationships taken in their broadest sense, refers to the realm of experience that lies closest to the psychoanalyst's daily work'. He goes on: 'Yet psychoanalysis does not possess a satisfactory theory of object-relations. … The absence of a unified theory of object-relations has prevented psychoanalysts from sharing a common conceptual language, thus obscuring areas of fundamental clinical agreement.' Accordingly this book is subtitled: 'An Introduction to a Psychoanalytic Theory of Object Relations'.