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The prospect of reviewing a book written about severely disturbed patients by a man who is neither a psychoanalyst nor a clinician is a daunting prospect. James M. Glass is a Professor of Government at the University of Maryland. This book is about the phenomenology and subjective experience of severe psychiatric illness and is done with sensitivity and empathy for these very miserable patients. In addition, its primary objective is a criticism of postmodernist philosophical theory, utilizing clinical material derived mainly from multiple-personality patients. Material is also drawn from schizophrenic and borderline patients seen over a long period of years, during the author's consultative practices with The Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. Freud was always suspicious of the narrowly focused attitude of the physician/analyst, whom he felt would see human beings as collections of symptoms and syndromes rather than as whole people. Some have theorized that he searched for prototypical analysts from fields other than medicine, more specifically to avoid this narrowly focused rigidity. Freud clearly believed that a broad “whole person” focus was necessary to conduct an analysis and that relieving the person of neurotic symptoms alone was not sufficient. Thus, many of his early protégés were nonclinical. The idea of nonclinical individuals looking at psychoanalytic patients and perspectives is also well established in the practices of many psychoanalytic institutes, particularly in Topeka where there has always been strong support for nonclinically trained analysts. Glass provided, from the outset, an intriguing challenge. I was hoping that this nonclinician would be also to expand the idea of the psychoanalytic perspective from the philosopher's viewpoint—not merely philosophy applied to psychoanalysis, as is currently fashionable, but psychoanalysis applied to philosophy. Instead Glass is somewhat disappointing, although