This is a most interesting and thought-provoking book, which presents complex ideas in the clear and approachable way that characterizes all Hinshelwood's writing. It is also a very personal book, as it states in the introduction. It draws on Hinshelwood's work as an analyst and his experience as a psychiatrist in the 1960s, wanting to listen to his patients, and to help them to autonomy, yet also finding himself helping nurses to insist that reluctant patients had the ECT recommended for them. The comparison of analysis and brainwashing, or the question put in the title of the book — therapy or coercion?, seems at first sight to be