The author presents a well-researched, comprehensive, and detailed discussion of the conversations between Freud and the French author/mystic Romaine Rolland in an attempt to fill in the gap in the literature regarding the relationship between mysticism and psychoanalysis. Limitations in this discussion derive from the controversy engendered by the publication of Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927) and by Freud's pathoiogizing of mystical experience in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Until recently, Freud's position has formed the basis for the psychoanalytic understanding of mysticism. Parsons questions