The title of this important book, radical in its commitment to conserving Freud's insights, names three issues that M. Guy Thompson weaves into a unified theme. The encounter with the real refers to Freud's reality principle (pace, Lacan), a process in which the self strives to grow beyond hallucinatory wish-fulfillment and neurotic pretense by wrestling with disappointment in love honestly enough to embrace the exigencies entailed in the lifelong interplay of memory, history, unconscious intention, quirks of fate, objects, and interactions. The truth about Freud's technique is a double-entendre that serves first as a reminder that what Freud actually