This book contains Balint's collected papers which were written during the years 1930 to 1952. They appear at this time because he feels that with the appearance of his last two papers, On Love and Hate, and New Beginning and the Paranoid and the Depressive Position, his ideas have reached a certain completeness.

Although Balint acknowledges the influence of Ferenczi, his book is essentially a personal one. His main theme is 'New Beginning'. He says that he noticed certain phenomena that emerged toward 'the end of the cure'. These consisted of demands from his patients for small gratifications, such as touching his hand, being stroked, and so on. Balint's observation is that these wishes could only be satisfied by another individual; any auto-erotic satisfaction was 'simply impossible'.