Gordon's nine essays explore the literary reception of Freud in various contexts. They study the connection of his psychoanalysis to: the concepts of tragedy and comedy; to literary criticism as represented by Harold Bloom; the cognitive challenge of his (and Darwin's) major theories; the competition between his concept of depth and that of certain novelists; the concept of memory illustrated in Proust and cognitive neuroscience; the imagining of one's own death represented by post-Enlightenment poetry; the interpretation of "Hamlet"; Nietzsche's idea of "the good European"; and, finally, to what a cultural perspective can contribute in assessing the value of psychoanalysis today.