Barbara Socor has written a very good book. It is lucid, even when exploring some abstruse and opaque regions of psychoanalytic thought. It is ambitious, taking on the major theorists of the ego and the self. It is focused, telling the story of psychoanalysis from the well-defined vantage point of the epistemologies implicit in the underlying concepts of presence and absence. It is reflective, displaying a sound and subtly nuanced grasp of the fundamental philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts around which the basic theme of the work is formulated.