I hope that this important book will find the widest possible psychoanalytic audience. It is rare that a ground-breaking exploration of new theoretical resources for the profession can be shown to have such immediate application to and illumination of the everyday data of psychoanalytic treatment. With its many detailed clinical examples, Palombo's new book shows how ideas that will initially sound strange and even austerely natural-scientific can jar us out of a rut and open up new ways of thinking productively about very familiar problems with patients.

That's the good news, but there is some bad news as well: much of the book is difficult reading. Unfortunately, Palombo is not a gifted expositor or popularizer of the concepts from an impressive array of extra-psychoanalytic sources that have stimulated him to so many insights. So his summaries of those books and articles,