Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art and Homos. Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst, visiting professor in the Department of English at York University, the general editor of Penguin Modern Classics's Freud translations, and the author of twelve books, including Going Sane and Side Effects.

"This is a beautifully crafted book, one that underscores how the social life of the psyche is a matter of risk, wager, suspense, excitation, bodies, talk, and all manner of things both dangerous and sustaining." - Judith Butler "In this fascinating and disturbing book, two writers with prose and intellectual styles that are at once famously identifiable and intimately personal celebrate the possibility of relationships that defy identity and undo personality.... Bersani and Phillips at once dream of shattering the ego and, in their own distinct voices, display its miraculous, tragicomic persistence." - Stephen Greenblatt"