Anyone expecting a logical synthesis of ideas in a psychoanalytic article will blush with embarrassment over such a scattering of ideas about the body image and the ego as this presents. The author rambles from Hegel to grasshoppers, from Socrates to Socius, with some Latin from St. Augustine thrown in for good measure. In the end he finds it not necessarily advantageous to have a strong ego; the therapist can free his patient by letting the latter do all the talking.

As an example of this 'neo-confusionism', let me quote the following: 'Here we see the ego in its essential resistance to the elusive process of Becoming, to the variations of Desire. This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Ascent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety.'

I fear the author has slid back.