pThe purpose of this book is to acquaint educated interested persons with, as well as to help students and professionals in the mental health field learn about the psychodynamics of mental illness. To facilitate learning about the issues involved and in order to make this information more convincing, more intelligible, and hopefully more interesting for the reader, I have cast it in the unusual form of what I call a didactic novel. To my knowledge this has not been tried before. Here the lectures, the discussions, and the arguments are interspersed with dramatizations illustrating how the basic assumptions behind psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are experienced in actual everyday living situations. Also dramatized and discussed are some of the current controversies in the field and the socioeconomic influences that bring pressure on those who practice psychodynamic therapy and influence their theory formation. The approach I have employed enables me to present arguments a