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Derry Macdiarmid died in 2006 after a long struggle with cancer, while in the process of transforming into a book the years of lectures he had given to psychiatrists in training at Guy's Hospital in London. The fact that this book was completed and published at all is a testimony to one of its major themes: the centrality of love, as this task was completed posthumously by his wife.
While the book is marketed as a monograph and not a series of essays, the unusual circumstances surrounding the completion and publication of Century of Insight: The Twentieth Century Enlightenment of the Mind are reflected in the fact that it is a kind of collage without internal structure and trajectory. It is at once the author's personalized history of psychoanalysis; a summary of the theories of persons the author believed were its major creators that includes information ranging from factual biography to psychobiography, to sometimes gossip-like judgments about their personalities; the author's religious beliefs; sections on dissociation and on dreaming; and even his own very personal self-revelations.
If I had to pick a single descriptor that unifies such a disparate collection, it would be its inspirational quality, bordering at times on evangelical. Two concluding statements characterize this quality: “Dreaming is about learning to love, just as life is about learning to love, and evolution