Lucy Holmes has accomplished something extraordinary: she has written a book accessible to novices and newcomers to psychoanalytic practice that simultaneously offers insight of value to advanced clinicians. She gives a compelling account of her ideas about how psychoanalysis works and about how and why it has the potential to free us from what appears to be immutable fate. Holmes does this in large part by sharing the frankly emotional essence of her clinical work in the case histories she selects from her extensive private practice. It's a generously passionate book. Because the depictions of the lives Holmes describes and the accounts of what transpired in her consulting room are so engaging and vivid, the book's significant scholarly aspect is easy to overlook, but in addressing issues facing patients, therapists, and society at large, she deftly applies and discusses concepts from a huge range of the literature of neuroscience, medicine, religion, philosophy, literature, and classic and contemporary psychoanalysis.