Drawing heavily on the theoretical concepts of Melanie Klein and his own previous paper on the death instinct, Stokes attempts to delineate the metapsychology of resignation. He suggests that resignation involves a freeing of 'the refusal component' from persecutory fusions, especially from envy, and that the capacity for resignation requires the infantile experience of an unidealized good object.

An intriguing contribution to the psychology of thermonuclear war was included in discussing the role of envy in resignation. Stokes suggests that one