Our capacity to mean more than we say is the common thread of all the essays here, which explore philosophically the phenomenon of transference in psychotherapy, the nature of the unconscious mind and the role of Eros in Freud's thinking… In the chapter 'Knowingness and Abandonment: An Oedipus for Our Time,' Mr. Lear reinterprets Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus…[arguing] that Oedipus's flaw was to have understood the Delphic oracle too easily, to have assumed that 'meaning is transparent to human reason' and to have ignored 'unconscious meaning'… Mr. Lear offers similarly astute and original readings of Aristotle's Poetics, Plato's Symposium and Republic and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He feels free to range so widely because he sees the work of these writers as related; each in its own way was 'working out the logic of the soul.' Each knew 'that one of the most important truths about us is that we have the capacity to be open minded: the capacity to live nondefensively with the question of how to live'… The critical essays will prove of value to anyone seriously engaged by literature. And the chapters on Freud and Oedipus are worth the price of admission alone… Mr. Lear concludes [that] 'What matters, as Freud himself well understood, is what we are able to do with the meanings we make'… These essays prompt us to examine those meanings, which activity, as Plato famously said, is what makes life worth living.