In this era of rapid change in psychoanalysis there is a need for a work that bridges tradition and innovation. This book is devoted to building that bridge. On the one side there are the fundamental contributions of Freud and the great modern developers of ego psychology, and on the other the panoramas being opened by object-relational theory and practice, feminist thought, and postmodern critical theory.

In this book, both the old and the new are shown to have significant strengths and distinctive problematic aspects, and the same may be said of the many transitional positions now prevalent among workers in the field of mental health.

Many central ideas have had to be rethought; these include the nature of interpretation as a process, the validation of interpretations, the significant role played by countertransference in the therapeutic process, and the problem of working either systematically or eclectically in a discipline which now contains a number of strong competing points of view.