Mary Jacobus uses a quotation from Freud as the epigraph to her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading. “A profitable return from grey theory to the perpetual green of experience.” The quotation aptly describes the contrast between the hoary abstractness of all explanatory systems, psychoanalytic and otherwise, and living experience, whose verdant richness defies categorization. Yet sometimes theory can be used to revivify life, to deepen our appreciation of the colors of every day experience that may not always be lush green or cloudless blue. Such is the case with Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, a probing account of the intersubjective exchanges that characterize both psycho analysis and reading. Based on the Clarendon Lectures given to the English Faculty of Oxford University in 1997, the book reveals Jacobus's