This book tells the tale of an analyst's discovery and implementation of two authors in the field of clinical practice. The author takes up perversion, a condition that specialists have often refused to treat, to show how patients who seek therapy draw their analysts into complex communicational tourniquets. In highly ritualized scenarios, deeply rooted feelings of guilt are projected onto listeners. They are asked to play the role of mother in a dyadic relation of “symbiotic illusion” that recalls the earliest beginnings of life. In these scenarios, the author describes how “ambivalence or anger [is] excluded, suppressed, and traded off against guilt.” The patient's ambivalent sentiments toward the other are “turned against the self, and added to the masochistic core” (p. 77), thus leading the patient (usually male) to play the role of a helpless victim of his parent—usually the mother—who is treated as a sadist. Analysts encounter the formidable task, first, of breaking the relation in which they are asked to play a commanding role