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In the twelfth and final chapter of the book Meltzer explains why it was written by two authors: the reason is that the two sciences of psychoanalysis and art, or in this case, literary criticism, are so intertwined with one another when approached from a descriptive vertex, that they share the same foundation: truthfulness based on observation. According to the structure of the mind and methods of observation that Meltzer has evolved in a series of books, this means observation of the mind and its mysteries. But such observation very soon becomes “comprehension”, or rather “apprehension” of beauty. The title of the article, and of the book published in Italian seven years ago by Loescher was “too good to be dropped”: it thus appears again as the title of the first chapter, and indeed of the new book itself, which, in order to be distinguished from the previous work could be entitled in italian L'apprensione della bellezza. This will thus convey the idea that the encounter with beauty arouses fear, and that one easily shrinks back or turns away from the aesthetic conflict it provokes, as Meltzer sets out to show. The book is dedicated to all ordinary beautiful devoted mothers, as the title of a book by Winnicott has it. But Meltzer does not only refer to the beauty of the world, of nature, of the mother: Bion, our Virgil, has led us to appreciate particularly the beauty of the mind. “The mind is the metaphor-generating function which uses the great computer [the brain] to write its poetry and paint its pictures of a world scintillating with meaning” (p. 14). We are thus dealing with a reaffirmation of the Leonardian and Goethian unity of art and science, which would seem to indicate that the artistic mind presides over and modulates the complex work of the mechanical brain. For Meltzer (and for the family of Martha Harris) the literary roots of such a reaffirmation lie in Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Keats, the philosophical ones in Plato, Whitehead, Wittgens