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When I was a freshman in college I had the kind of experience only freshmen can have, an experience that brought acute embarrassment at the time and nostalgic amusement later. My high school education had been narrow and did not encompass scientific articles; it was not until college that I was exposed to footnoted documents for the first time. In my reading for my college courses I noted that one particular reference cropped up again and again, and I began to picture a comprehensive compendium of knowledge containing something from every conceivable field. The enormous encyclopedia I imagined covered several walls in the library and was called The Ego and the Id. One day, in an especially expansive mood, I tried to discover where I might find this wondrous collection. What I found in the card catalog, spelled out in red ink to match my heated embarrassment, was: "The Ego and the Id: this is not a book."
It was only later that I could appreciate why I had formulated The Ego and the Id in that way. My religious upbringing had led me to expect