It is hard to know quite how to categorize Gila Ashtor’s Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche, and this may well be by design. The book’s title is itself both evocative and provocative. In his early work, soon after completing his detailed analysis of Freud’s writings and publishing The Language of Psychoanalysis (19731), Laplanche2 wrote about the “permanence of an exigency” running through the entire body of Freud’s work from the Project for a Scientific Psychology to the Outline of Psychoanalysis. Laplanche suggested this exigency to be a manifestation of Freud’s object of study, namely the sexual unconscious. So, I was intrigued by Ashtor’s playful inversion of terms and wondered how the psychoanalysis of an exigency might morph into an exigent psychoanalysis, and for what reason and to what ends?