Power Games is a brilliant exploration of the psychodynamic strategies unconsciously enacted to spare the person the imagined pain and frustration of an authentic encounter. Although such strategic power operations can be characterological, they do not have to be: all people, even those rare individuals who are capable of ongoing intimacy, are forced at moments of fraility or interpersonal indecisiveness to play power games, and certainly the culture at large pervasively sponsors the enactment of opportunistic interpersonal strategies. In this new book, Gerald Alper, whose Portrait of the...