Jake Singer is an anxious young schoolteacher in New York - barely on speaking terms with his father, recently abandoned by his girlfriend, and heading for a life of compromise and mediocrity. Emotionally paralyzed by his mothers death, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a maniacal Freudian - Dr. Ernesto Morales, therapist from hell. But when he meets socialite widow Allegra Marshall, and finds himself upwardly mobile in the Manhattan of serious money and glamour - as he bounces from the couch to Allegra's bed in the allegedly real world and back again - his whole life begins to take on the eerie, overdetermined quality of an analytic session and he must figure out his escape.