On the cover of Philip Bromberg's new book is a telescopic closeup of the moon, half-lit so that its craters and plains show their pocked history, and half-dark, fading to blackness, no moon at all. In this case, you can tell the book by its cover.

Bromberg's territory is dissociation, the mental rendering of blackness. In his clinical explorations he traverses the borderland between unknown dark and the darkling plain of recollected conflict, the field of awareness wherein one lives one's conscious life. He manages in this luminous book two feats. One is a masterful presentation of clinical psychoanalysis in vivo, the interchanges between analyst and analysand and how his theoretical