The author states that her primary purpose is “to give an anatomy of metaphor as used by therapist and patient in depth psychotherapy” (p. ix). Her secondary goal is to provide a bridge between the best of Freud and Jung and the object relationists of the British middle school. She announces that in her pursuit of the bridge metaphor, she will cite Jung increasingly as she goes along. Ellen Siegelman is a psychologist with a strong literary background who took postdoctoral training with some members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute in a program at Mt. Zion Hospital. She later trained at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where she is a member.

The book is based on a course Siegelman taught to therapists, and is organized appropriately for such a purpose. The first chapter