This is a wonderfully jumpy book, as so many conference proceedings are. The conference memorialized here was held at Stanford University in 1991, ostensibly to celebrate Freud's contributions to a psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In fact, however, it allowed various prominent minds to range freely over the cultural terrain, with a psychoanalytic compass in hand, sometimes—but only sometimes—pointing to that supposedly steady North Star, Freud, while otherwise oscillating, often wildly, in the direction of other psychoanalytic stars.