In Paul Gray's The Ego and Analysis of Defense, we have a sequential compilation of the author's contributions to the psychoanalytic literature, centring on psychoanalytic technique and its theoretical underpinnings. The central aim of Gray's clinical approach concerns maximising the analysand's capacity for self-observation, especially in relation to the activation of defence in the face of intrapsychic conflict. Gray's work has been enormously influential in crystallising issues relating to the technical management of defence analysis, a therapeutic activity taken for granted, but in Gray's view, requiring more careful scrutiny than is usually accorded it in discussions of technique.

Analysts have been slow to operationalise technically Freud's structural model described in The Ego and the Id and Symptoms, Inhibitions and Anxiety. In a series of manuscripts written during the