At a time when the relations between morality, the social fabric and the inner world are causing distress throughout the world, Rob Weatherill provides a searching study of the growing impoverishment of life in Western society. He plumbs the depths of the ways our culture impoverishes and does violence to our private selves and spaces. He addresses himself to the role of ideals in psychoanalysis and brings a Kleinian perspective to bear on the schizoid nature of modern culture; the emptiness of the addict; the crisis in education; feminism and the shattering of male narcissism.