It is always a great pleasure to read Joyce McDougall. She is one of the rare psychoanalysts to combine wit, charm, and clarity with breadth of knowledge and complexity of thought. Moreover, this book is one of those about which one can honestly say that it really is for the novice and the sophisticated clinician. In her opening chapters, McDougall expands upon her theatrical metaphor and simultaneously gives us the basics of psychoanalysis. I would recommend these chapters to any student for the ease with which they demonstrate how psychoanalytic theory and practice fit together. Using clinical material she links psychosexual and narcissistic conflicts—what she calls the theater of the forbidden and the theater of the impossible—to