The effort to discern the roots and sources of psychoanalytic ideas can generally be regarded as a worthy enterprise, one that brings an added dimension to our understanding of psychoanalytic concepts and helps to situate them in the history of ideas and culture more generally. While I am generally sympathetic to this approach and like to think of myself as receptive to any new perspectives that may arise from it, I come away from my reading of this book with an uneasy feeling which has something to do with where the inquiry leads, the conclusions of which I find unpalatable, but more, I fear, to do with the methodology which I find suspect and questionable. If Sigmund Freud were alive, as the old joke has it, he would, I fear, be turning over in his grave.

The story that unfolds in these pages is the following. We begin at the beginning of the Christian era with the teachings of Plotinus, who proclaimed