Part of the “Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications” series coordinated by the International Psychoanalytical Association's Publication Committee, this book is the last one written by André Green, a consummate master clinician of French psychoanalysis. This volume can only be understood as an attempt to assess more than fifty years of devoted psychoanalytic practice and to glean some useful lessons, as the author looks back on some of his fundamental beliefs about our field and confronts—for one last time—the multiple sorrows, failures, and disappointed expectations that have assailed him along the way.

The book's title reveals the nature of the enterprise: illusions are wishful beliefs that in the end prove to be vain hopes, and disillusions represent the need to come to terms with certain limitations that the author had perhaps not been willing to face earlier in his career. After one gives up illusions, one is left with disillusions. A certain bitterness