Gems, then, mostly; but for all its elegant delights the book has its defects. Not enough attention is paid to history, nor to the overwrought and sexually charged brother-sister relationships or cousin-incest in joint-family situations. More seriously, Hinduism (contra some forceful suggestions by Obeyesekere) often becomes cognate with India. Two, there's no List of Contributors: a crucial and puzzling exclusion; one would not know from reading this book that Ramanujan is primarily a linguist, or that Masson is both a Sanskritist and formerly keeper of the Freud Archives who has written extensively on both Central Asian Sanskrit and the emotional life of dogs. The hugest dereliction, however, is the absence of Harold Bloom's incandescent suggestion that Freud is a late event in European shamanism: it's as a shaman (self-healed soul-healer) that he can be compared, fruitfully, to Indian shamans: the reductive aspects of his psychology bear point-by-point comparison to, lets say, Buddhist meditational grids. One can analogise Hinduism and Freudianism as two systems of thought, then, or allow one to supplement the other rather than aiming at joint dissonance. Bearing this in mind, the most charming admonition comes from Shakuntala: ...meditation is better than psychoanalysis...but best of all is meditation and psychoanalysis...'.