Ignês Sodré was born in Brazil, where she qualified as a clinical psychologist before coming to London in 1969 to train at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. She is a Fellow and a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She has taught extensively in London and abroad, and was the first visiting professorial Fellow in Psychoanalysis at Birkbeck College. She has published many papers on psychoanalysis and on literature; this is her second book.

Sodré interweaves scholarly psychoanalytic knowledge and extensive clinical experience with insights derived from close readings of great literature.

Introduction. Maggie and Dorothea: Reparation and Working Through in George Eliot's Novels. Non Vixit: A Ghost Story. Who's Who? Notes on Pathological Identifications. Death by Daydreaming: Madame Bovary. Psychoanalysis and Literature. Imparadised in Hell: Idealisation, Erotisation and the Return of the Split-Off. 'For Ever Wilt Thou Love, and She Be Fair!': On Quixotism and the Golden Age of Pre-Genital Sexuality. Introduction to Iris Murdoch's Henry and Cato. Certainty and Doubt: Transparency and Opacity of the Object. Florence and Sigmund's Excellent Adventure: On Oedipus and Us. The Wound, The Bow and The Shadow of the Object: Notes on Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia'. 'Where the Lights and Shadows Fall': On Not Being Able to Remember and Not Being Able to Forget. 'Even Now, Now, Very Now...' : On Envy and the Hatred of Love.The 'Perpetual Orgy': Hysterical Phantasies, Bisexuality and the Question of Bad Faith. Addiction to Near-Life: On Pathological Daydreaming and the Disturbing Ambiguity of Faking True-Love.