Jake Singer, an anxious young English teacher at a prestigious New York prep school, is heading for a life of personal despair and professional mediocrity. Recently abandoned by his girlfriend, disgusted with his own neurasthenic idling, and emotionally paralysed by a case of the vapour, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a black-bearded, bodybuilding Cuban-Catholic Freudian whose accent and tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition. Dr Ernesto Morales is a therapist from hell, a man who wields his sarcasm like a machete in the slash-and-burn process he calls interpretation - otherwise known as the Treatment.
Then Jake meets socialite-widow Allegra Marshall, and as he bounces from the couch to Allegra's bed in the allegedly real world and back again, his life takes on the eerie, over-determined quality of an analytic session.
