Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytical Studies.Sacha Bollas, PsyD, is a psychologist and advanced candidate at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytical Studies.

• IntroductionAcknowledgements1. The narcissist2. The borderline3. The manic depressiveDiscussion with Sacha Bollas, PsyD

'this book is worth the investment of both reading and thinking about. […] The book takes the reader, sometimes at breath-taking speed, through Bollas’s ideas about character developed over 30 plus years of clinical work and writing. Through his dissecting and describing the lived experiences of the various character structures, the reader is offered a way of thinking about clinical work with these sufferers. […] Bollas’s endeavour to understand the territory and to give his patients the space to be who they are comes through. In answer to one of the questions, Bollas writes of ‘the right of free speech in analysis’ (p. 67). I think the book shows something of how he has tried to demonstrate this in his writing as well as how he tries to give this freedom to his patients.'