The ability of psychotherapists to tolerate their own feelings in the clinical situation determines how their patients experience and tolerate their own intense and often distressing affect. The author describes, in detail, how he works with difficult patients, trying to engage them as deeply and fully as both they and he can tolerate.

To help patients with their affect intolerance, therapists need to tolerate, contain and manage their own feelings. This text shows how to work with more difficult patients in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. By accessing a full range of overwhelming and unbearable feelings, and by persisting in the therapeutic process, therapists can creatively help their patients tolerate feelings that they have for so long avoided or disrupted.