This title is misleading. It becomes immediately apparent to the psychoanalytic reader that the author's understanding of psychoanalysis is academic, limited to a degree that betrays him into such a brash statement as, 'Freud's outmoded concern over polarities …'. Although eighteen of Freud's works are listed in the bibliography, 'the historical features in the development of his [Freud's] thinking are clearly outlined in Thompson and need not concern us here'. It seems incongruous at best for a book, allegedly psychoanalytic, to lean on such questionable authority.