Jake Singer is an anxious young schoolteacher living in New York. He is barely on speaking terms with his father, was recently abandoned by his girlfriend, and is heading for a life of compromise and mediocrity at a prestigious uptown prep school. Emotionally paralyzed, Jake embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with the maniacal Argentine-Freudian Dr. Ernesto Morales, therapist from hell, who wields his heavily accented sarcasm like a machete. Morales' tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, and soon Jake is just trying to keep him at a distance while planning his escape. But when he meets socialite widow Allegra Marshall, Jake finds himself upwardly mobile in the Manhattan of serious money and glamour. Bouncing from Morales’s couch to Allegra's bed and back again, Jake finds his whole life taking on the strange unpredictable quality of a therapy session.