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Christopher Bollas's new book is to be highly recommended. As with his other books, this is an evocative and stimulating addition to the psychoanalytic literature, written in his unique and compelling literary style; and it continues to develop his important contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique. The title is from the last act of King Lear, where the king is both mad and yet sees the truth of things for the first time. One of Bollas's main themes is how the psychoanalytic method of free association leads to the discovery of the patient's truth by means which completely undermine the structure of Western epistemology. The method of free association and the act of interpretation decentre the patient's usual grasp of things; and, by breaking up the customary thread of discourse, the patient's truth is approached. Like Lear, the patient in a sense has to experience a form of madness in order to see clearly. Yet Bollas emphasizes how neither Freud nor those who have come after him have found this discovery an easy one. Free association is still subversive; we still need certainties; and there is a resistance to free association. Freud released us by his method to be continuously mysterious to ourselves and others. This is not only a philosophical position but also has clinical implications. As the analytic narrative moves in puzzling ways, ‘patients become informatively incoherent and they learn that the analyst wants them to speak passing ideas occurring in the back of the mind, caught up as they are in the logic of narrative about something quite unrelated. “But if I tell you what I am thinking, I won't make sense,” is an understandable cry, yet in time they come to appreciate this remarkable and strange freedom to speak in fragments’ (pp. 1-2).