Even though this book bears traces of the obscure syntax and language often favored by academic postmodernism, still it has a lot to teach. It documents a cultural conversation of which psychoanalysis in general was, early on, a critical part. Through its pages parade 150 years of socially engaged intellectual thought: Marx, Freud, Ferenczi and Gramsci; Sartre, Mannoni, Memmi, Fanon, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and de Beauvoir; Baldwin, Malraux and Malcolm X; Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Spivak. Viewing colonialism psychoanalytically, the book also ‘reads’ psychoanalysis historically. Poignantly, for example, it retells Freud's