‘I hope to entice you on a journey of discovery into the unconscious that will include the ideas of Freud, Jung and Adler, and others from the 1890s through to the end of the twentieth century’. So begins Derry Macdiarmid's posthumously published book, which sweeps across the last century, addressing questions of religion, spirituality, anthropology and philosophy through the lens of analytic thought, alighting in short chapters on selected thinkers and clinicians.

It is a broad canvas, punctuated sometimes a little jarringly, though often amusingly, by anecdotes and vignettes from his personal experience and the lives of others. Much of the material derives from his years of teaching dynamic psychotherapy to student psychiatrists, and his voice drives the ideas along as if