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Somewhere between received wisdom and hackneyed cliché lies the old adage ‘one should not judge a book by its cover’; a common-place sentiment so apparently sound that it hardly seems worth reflecting upon. Yet it is right here that we might begin. The object, in its lay sense, is a hard-backed book, on the red side of pink, emblazoned in its middle with The Impossibility of Sex. Covering this, like a grey skin, is a dust-jacket depicting the back of a woman's head and the legend ‘Susie Orbach’. (Exactly whose head is never revealed, though the author's would be a fair guess.) Cut into the centre of this head is a small square hole, perhaps discovering what's at the back of this therapist's mind and, then, perhaps not. My equivocation relates to the curious demands The Impossibility of Sex places upon the reader, falling as it does between the known genres of metapsychological primers, case histories and collections of short stories. Indeed, it is as if this ‘generic straddling’ is signed by the physical fact of the book long before we realize that the preponderance of what follows is an analyst thinking about a made-up therapist thinking about made-up clients. However, the book is so much more than this. The narrative layering reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales or, say, the novels of Henry James is there to further Orbach's endeavour to remove the shrouds of secrecy that have surrounded psychoanalysis for years and to ‘make an authentic representation of feeling states’ (p. 197), particularly those of the working therapist. The irony of wearing a mask in order to tell a truth is not lost on the author, who does not attempt to perform the intriguing if unethical feat of rendering ‘What really goes on in the therapist's consulting room’, as the press release merrily trumpets. Instead, with deconstructive insight into the case history, she points out that it was ever thus as, through the necessary acts of ‘selection and concealment’ (p. 194), a distortion and fiction