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For me, the paradigm of psychoanalysis began shifting radically with the writings of Heinz Kohut. Kohut's formulations of the preoedipal transferences provided an anchor for understanding the positive affects and joys associated with character development, mastery, and ego autonomy that so many contemporary patients have either never experienced or lost during their experiences with damaging or unfulfilling maturational environments.
Few subsequent psychoanalytic theorists, however, have been able to develop a broader, more differentiated and encompassing theoretical approach to the positive affects and associated object relations than has Morton Kissen. Even more important, Kissen has gone much further than anyone else in demonstrating the analyst's role in bringing to the foreground the experiences underlying the character pathologies resulting from damaging early environments and in ameliorating the impact of deficient early objects in the suffering experienced by these patients.
This volume is likely to take an important place among several significant theoretical essays, including the works of Sandler and Rosenblatt, Guntrip, Hartmann, and Kohut. This company, however, only begins to describe the advance Kissen makes. Now, 100 years after the publication of Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria,