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Freud wrote that every person is only normal on the average, that everyone's ego approximates the psychotic in some part and to some extent. Shengold writes, “It is my thesis in this book that we, even the sanest among us, are all to some extent ‘meshugoid’” (p. 3). By and large, though, psychotic and psychotic-like phenomena have been viewed traditionally as discontinuous, quantitatively and qualitatively from the neurotic and normal. Shengold's premise, however, is that a common primal base in all mental development provides for the ubiquity of certain delusions and for continuities that raise phenomena that have been regarded traditionally as seriously pathological to the status of the psychopathology of everyday life. He considers, therefore, that the clinical rubrics assumed under his chapter headings (e.g., Delusion in a Neurotic Person, Narcissistic Delusions, Paranoid Delusions, Malignant Envy, Delusions Involved in Perversions, and Being in Love) are arbitrary because most patients presenting with everyday delusions are suffering from combinations of all of them. Fundamental to the principle of continuity is the idea of a spectrum on which all conditions may be ordered. It follows that Shengold is not concerned with diagnostic entities—the concept of borderline personality organization is certainly of no particular interest to him—because such divisions suggest discontinuous categories rather than the continuities essential to the assumption of a universal developmental human core that links us all.