This is a highly personal presentation which psychiatrists will find stimulating and thought-provoking. They will tend to overlook occasional inaccuracies, historical and other, and enjoy reading a book of unusual breadth written by a scholar to whom dynamic psychiatry owes a great deal. The author has in common with the late Paul Schilder catholicity of interests and the quest for philosophical foundations of psychiatry. One wishes only that he did not give the impression that the psychiatric millennium has all but arrived.