ABSTRACT
The work on this book has been a labor of love and a task filled with emotion for both of us. From the beginning of our collaboration, we were committed to bringing readers closer to the depth and richness of the work of Emmanuel Ghent. This introduction argues for a more integrated and interdependent perspective on Ghent as person. He integrated ideas from attachment theory, the study of regulation of affect, of self states, and of attention to deep affect in the service of getting away from dissociation, long before it was commonplace to work this way. Ghent's major papers have also been designed to place Ghent in his social, intellectual and psychoanalytic context, and to draw lines and links between Ghent and other figures who come before and after him. His period of high productivity in psychoanalysis is relatively short: the 1990s.
