He is interested in how to work with self-harming borderline patients: In particular the kinds of counter-transference difficulties they arouse and the multiple meanings, including lifesaving one, attached to their self-destructive behaviours. He is author of numerous papers including: ‘Self-harm: a strategy for survival and nodal point of change’ (2006), and co-authored with Duncan Maclean, ‘Treatment of personality disorder: limit setting and the use of benign authority’ (2007) and a soon to be published paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy on, ‘The use of Benign Authority with severe borderline patients: A psychoanalytic paradigm’.