Dr McDougall never underestimates the complexities involved in trying to understand patients who tend to somatize. In her elegantly written clinical vignettes she exposes her way of working and her efforts at understanding.

Very early in the book McDougall describes a situation which moved her and also gave me some sense of what she expects from herself in her psychoanalytic encounters. 'After years of difficult, though to all appearances successful work, I terminated analysis with an alcoholic patient. He went on to build an international reputation for his creativity and as he rose in fame, to become a happy ambassador for psychoanalysis. Then, after years had gone by, he returned to announce that he was dying—dying of a cancer of the throat whose earlier symptoms were not