Robert Eisner's book is an eminently readable excursion into classical mythology. Its content, capturing the scope of the Greek imagination and psychological mindedness on the eve of Western civilization, should prove to be of considerable interest to those who work in applied psychoanalysis. Eisner's theoretical perspective—ranging eclectically and rather haphazardly across Freudian, Jungian, and other schools of interpretation—is less illuminating. Nor does he quite make good on his implicit promise to offer alternatives to, or at least a systematic critique of, the methodologies analysts have employed in attempting to understand the motives for making myths and the meanings to be gleaned from them.

Eisner's title is an allusion to the road not taken at the crossing of the three highways where Oedipus slew Laius—figuratively, therefore, to stories other than the Theban tragedy which was destined to become the shibboleth of Freud's psychoanalysis. In the opening