The author equates psychoanalysts with double agents. He means that therapists must be many things to many men. In this way they can be compared to playwrights and their audiences. He does not differentiate between experience as a patient and the activity of playgoers who 'experience in their depth'.

Playwrights are classified as proto-freudian, freudian, and post-freudian. Two or three are named in each category and these categories are further delineated in ways that make more sense than the simplistic and questionable freudian categorization. Unlike other authors on this subject, Nelson does not use the term 'controlled regression' into nihilism that suggests the avant-garde might be renamed 'backward-guard'. He states that the 'alienation effect' of recent drama is akin to the procedures of paradigmatic psychotherapists. He warns that audiences do not wish to be stripped of their last defenses. This certainly would apply to patients as well.