The echo in Dr. Slipp's title of Betty Friedan's 1963 landmark The Feminine Mystique only obliquely reflects this book's subject matter: it is mainly a psychohistory of Freud's relationship to women and its influence on his psychoanalytic theory and practice. As such it is interesting, informative, and scholarly an ambitious and largely successful attempt to integrate intrapsychic, familial, cultural, and social factors contributing to Freud's theories about women.

It is not without its flaws. In trying to be comprehensive Slipp sometimes loses his focus: for example the chapter on his own experimental studies of family interactions and “subliminal activation” has little to do with what precedes or follows it and might well have been omitted. At other points he digresses to explain basic