The authors, one a psychoanalyst and the other a mathematician, attempt to construct a scientifically rigorous, mathematically based model to understand affects. They

apply "catastrophe theory," which gives a visual model of discontinuities or sudden changes in behavior, to psychoanalytic concepts of normal and abnormal affect regulation. They emphasize the theory's ability to meet the scientific criteria of making and proving or disproving predictions. They succeed in making concepts such as hysteresis (the pairing of large delayed responses), the single and double cusp models, and the butterfly model, understandable to the layman, but the paper is clearly only a brief introduction to a complicated effort in the application of mathematically based theory to psychoanalytic concepts.