This book goes a long way toward locating Freud in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. Welsh (unlike many who tackle Freud these days) is imaginatively equipped to engage with "The Interpretation of Dreams," and approaches the book as one would a literary text, perhaps the only way in which it is possible to read Freud anymore. In doing so he manages to avoid the twin pitfalls of adulation and "Freud-bashing"; "useful" is the way I'd characterize it.