Imaginary Existences: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Phantasy, Fiction, Dreams, and Daydreams. By Ignês Sodré. Edited and with an introduction by Priscilla Roth. Hove, East Sussex, UK/New York:  Routledge, 2015.  265 pp.

In this wonderful book, Ignês Sodré deepens our appreciation of several literary heroines—Madame Bovary, Eliot's Dorothea and Maggie—and

several authors as well—Proust, Flaubert, and Thomas Mann, among others. Moreover, it seems to me that she expands our sense of what reading is. This is a book about psychoanalytic encounters—both with characters from literature and the writers who imagine them—and patients in the midst of their sessions. It is simultaneously a book about literature and psychoanalysis. Neither is weakened by the other, as can so often be the case in traditional works of applied psychoanalysis. Here the two poles, literature and psychoanalysis, develop each other seamlessly and intricately, each elaborating and expanding the other.

In her reading, Sodré is interested in creativity and the impediments by which the imagination is hindered. She means to get to a kind of psychological truthfulness, whether the object of her inquiry is literary or clinical. Ultimately, this is a book about apprehending and, yes, about reading: reading literature and reading psychoanalytically. It is a book about seeing as directly and fully as possible.

This pairing of a deep literary sensibility and an equally trenchant psychoanalytic perspective is profoundly moving and seems to me to have generated a book of unusually original and intelligent essays. The first of these essays centers on a discussion of author George Eliot. Here Sodré lays out various themes that she will return to and develop throughout the book: the appeal of the romantic daydream as producing a state of mind in which fantasy predominates and painful realities can be evaded, the use and misuse of idealization, and the problem of unbearable guilt—a complex state of mind that Sodré will explore in chapters to come. In this chapter, she zeroes in on the ending of The Mill on the Floss, one of Eliot's most-loved works.1 The ending is a sort of lapse on Eliot's part—a lapse into a romantic daydream, fuele