The elegant presentation of this volume provides a foretaste of the treatment the author gives to her subject. The very first encounter with the book reveals an integration of form and content whereby aesthetic impact is used as the approach of choice to ‘becoming acquainted’ with the themes to be discussed. There is an aesthetic side, too, to Melgar's understanding of the hypotheses of psychoanalysis, which is complemented by her writing style. Let us not forget the beauty of

Freud's writing, which is in my view a pendant to his discoveries—not to mention the inherent beauty of the discoveries themselves. This almost bodily register impels us to use different strategies and investigative methods in attempting to capture in words something of the affective vibration expressed. Freud himself gives us a masterly example in his attunement to the musicality—and this in a man who claimed to hate music!—of Dora's second dream: here he is surely making