The author reviews his experience with psychoanalytic treatment of regressed patients, many with borderline personality disorders and vulnerability to psychosis. He found that psychoanalysis with few parameters yielded better outcomes than face-to-face psychotherapy. He emphasizes the provision of a consistent "holding environment," using the analyst's personal feelings and associations as crucial information in the understanding of the unfolding transference-countertransference. When treatment is successful, there is usually regression to a distorted repetition of the relationship to the mother of infancy. Several clinical vignettes focus on the patient's use of projective identification, and the analyst's understanding of it. This usually culminates in the patient's greater acceptance of the defensively split-off and projected aspect of the self.