This work is, in the words of Dr Norman Freed, a rich picture of an empty landscape, the depression that is to be engaged to maximally avoid it and its ramifications. Redeker challenges with a powerful, cogent and disciplined series of arguments the premise of depression as a by product of post industrial ennui or emotive textures too deep and too complex to be addressed save by iatric intervention via massive doses of anti-depressants. The work contains significant discussions of Sartre, Laccan, Althuser and Derrida as well as a well reasoned philosophic placement of ennui as a way into that resonating reason that re integrates the mind with the moils of loss, re engagement and sanity. The epistemology of struggle is seen as a key feature of philosophic argument as is the plangent existential core of re achieved self and selfhood.