This is an ambitious book, far-reaching in its scope. Reiser takes up the task that Freud abandoned when he set aside the Project for a Scientific Psychology and turned to the 'figurative language peculiar to psychology' in order to understand the complex observations he was making while listening to his patients. This is not Reiser's first effort in this direction. In 1984 he published Mind, Brain, Body: Towards a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology, his first major step to test 'biology's unlimited possibilities' (Freud, 1920, p. 60) to answer the questions we put to it.

Reiser is particularly suited to take up a similar task. He belongs to that small group of writers in