I had an imaginary conversation with the editor of this book about his very felicitous choice of a title. Inasmuch as Dr. Akhtar is a poet as well as a psychoanalyst, it should be no surprise that he would veto my own immediate thought that the book is about ‘deviations’ from the norm in favor of the much more appropriate ‘unusual interventions.’ It does take a certain effort for someone who has been taught that there is a right way to do things to realize that the very words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have locked us into a straitjacket of normativity (another of my favorite words).

This is a book that asks the reader to suspend propriety about the conduct of treatment and also to open one's mind about a host of taken-for-granted issues in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. It starts, after an introductory list of the actions of some of the great names in psychoanalysis (such as Freud feeding the Rat Man), with a beginning chapter on fees that cannot help but make the reader struggle with the issues raised in each and