In line with her belief that the interpretation of dreams requires major aggressive effort if it is to penetrate through to latent thought, the author of “The Brush Stroke of Apelles: Two Homosexual Passions” traces the meanderings of a suppressed, distorted wish of a homosexual patient. She draws on both classical methodologies of dream interpretation and ideas from the sphere of linguistics, compounding these with mythological and literary descriptions and close study of language games. At the close of her telling reconstruction of the work of the unconscious, both in her patient and herself, she is on the track of a central homosexual fantasy and its consequences: the anal castration of the loved one.