The work of these authors represents a signal contribution to the study of affects, emotions, and feelings, whether from the perspective of empirical research or for its clinical application to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Alexithymia, the construct they have nominated to represent a cluster of deficits in the capacity to process emotions from the cognitive perspective, reveals by its cognitive processing failure its healthy, intact counterpart in the normal individual and thereby helps illuminate the unusual significance of emotional life for all of us. Advances in developmental psychology, neurobiology, infant development research, trauma research, new concepts of personality development, and newer concepts in psychoanalysis have all contributed to the evolution of a new and distinct entity, that of self-regulation in general and of affect regulation in particular. In regard to the latter it should be understood that one's ability to regulate one's affects is paired in turn with the need to allow these affects to regulate one's thinking and behaviour.

The role of affects in psychoanalytic theory has evolved over time from Freud's early discharge model and, as such, as a step–child to the instinctual drives, to its presently emerging status as subordinating the drives within the broad sweep of its new found relevance. In this new conceptual model, dysregulated emotions escape from the individual's self–regulating, self–organizing reciprocal feed–back loop and may instead pathologically alter biopsychosocial systems at random.