This sane and insightful discussion explores the nature of identity in late modern societies to criticize the way in which psychotherapy has become an ideology of late modernity and to emphasize the importance of negative' messages in psychoanalytic theory.

Ian Craib is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex and a psychoanalytic group psychotherapist.

1. Cutting Out Gingerbread People 2. The Organisation of Mourning 3. Psychoanalysis as the Theory of Disappointment 4. Looking on the Bright Side 5. The Organisation of Social Life 6. The Fragmentation of Everyday Life 7. The Powerful Self and Its Illusions 8. The Disappointments of Identity: What Sort of Man 9. The False Self of Late Modernity 10. The Disappointed Self 11. The Values of Psychoanalysis