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It is with considerable pleasure that I take the opportunity to review this very interesting book. At the outset, however, I should note that it is an extremely ambitious work and very difficult to summarize or encapsulate. Schlesinger reports that, as was true for Freud and is so for many of us clinicians, his initial interest in his topic—in this case, promising—arose as a consequence of his experience in the consulting room. He states in the preface:
I had not given much thought to the act of promising … until I was forced to by a patient whose way of relating himself to significant others, including me, was to invite us to depend on his uncalled for promises and then fail to keep them. [p. xi]
Schlesinger's examination of promising and its vicissitudes, initially identified in this patient, leads to an explication of its development in the psychoanalytic birth of the individual. With this perspective, he is able to cast light on promising as revealed in neurosis, and its deep and