Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion: By Ethel Spector Person. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co. 1988. Pp. 384.

Passionate romantic love is the subject of this book—its sources in our early lives, its relationship to imagination and creativity, its capacity to transform the lover and enable the lover to transform the self. For the lover, two aspects of his subjective experience are paramount, the centrality of his passion and the 'fact' of the superiority of the beloved. Generally there is a marked difference between the subjective

experience—rich, resonant, filled with promise—and the 'objective' observation on the part of friends—calibrated, calm, and judging. The perceptual dissonance between lovers and observers goes straight to the very essence of the experience of love. The lovers' leap out of objectivity and into subjectivity denies the barriers separating us, offering hope for a concordance of two souls.

Thus, somewhat condensed, Ethel Spector Person introduces us to what she conceives to be one of the most profoundly transforming experiences of our adult lives, and one of the most exciting spiritual adventures remaining for men and women in the modern world.

To describe the experience of love, she has drawn material from a wide variety of sources; from novels, films, autobiographies and biographies, and from letters, from the life stories of people she knows, even her grandparents, and from published case reports by others. Her examples are elegant, inclusive and apt; illustrating, broadening and exploring facets of an argument that runs through her work like an epigrammatic thread. Because the ardour of her style is so suited to the subject and so much a part of the pleasure of reading the book, much of this review will be selected from her own words.

Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, she says, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfil our deepest longings and our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves. Why do we fall in love when we do and why do we choose