Richard Wiseman`s task here was not an easy one. He has not taken the usual texts nor found the usual answers to late 20th Century problems. The deceptiveness of our motivations is certainly here, the constant complaint every therapist hears: this is the way I want my life to be, why do I always miss that goal and fall into the same difficulties? But the evocation of conscious versus unconscious drives does not pretend any longer to be the most useful approach. Difficulties and pain are integrated differently, the layering of experience takes precedence over avoidance, life`s joys are wherever you find them.

The author`s own work in psychotherapy - a rich Jungian and existential background - has combined with many years of university level teaching about great literature to make him capable of the structure of this book and its rather startling conclusion. I mean, finally, the presentation of a copletely new way of conceptualizing human life, its "meaing" and purpose, which will ultimately have to stand behind all psychotherapists` efforts to be helpful to their felow humans.

To single out just one example: the concept of Care and caring used to be a high moral directive - it was something for you to attain, something you have. In radically changed Heideggerian thought, Care is something you are. As always, the artists and poets point the way.

As this book reveals, the world of the 21st Century, of changing cares and responsibilities, was steadily appearing in works by authors as diverse as James Joyce and Heidegger, or Virginia Woolf and Rilke and Mann. They show us our duty in a fresh psychological perspective, that is, in a fully human sense.