A focus on affect integration and its derailments illuminates the complex interrelationships between developmental failure and the formation of psychic conflict, both in childhood and in the psychoanalytic situation. The specific contexts in which conflict takes form are situations in which central affect states of the child cannot be integrated because they fail to evoke the requisite responsiveness from the caregiving surround. Such unintegrated feeling states become the source of enduring inner conflict, because they are experienced as threats to both the person's established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. In treatment, the emergence of unintegrated affect is resisted for fear that the analyst will replicate the faulty responsiveness of the childhood milieu.