A young girl arrives at the office of Sigmund Freud with symptoms that have baffled the best medical minds in Vienna. During a lengthy psychoanalysis, a disturbing dream surfaces that figures in a cure but whose deeper meaning Freud deliberately withholds. The novel traces the heroine's subsequent journey to America to attend Vassar College, then back to Vienna where she finds herself in an arranged marriage marked by sexual bondage. Her efforts to escape an oppressive existence plunge her into a series of intrigues involving Carl Jung, the artist Gustav Klimt and her former analyst before she discovers how Freud's failure to fully interpret the dream altered the course of her life.