 These ideas are complemented in the book by original empirical research.The book is a curious mixture of explication and analysis; Parker oscillates between a description of a psychoanalytic theory and a critical account of how it has come to seem to be true to people in Western culture.The most important conceptual contribution by him in the book is that of the 'discursive complex' to explicate how psychoanalysis operates as a social construction and in lived experience.