Chodorow is struck by the lack of communication between clinical psychoanalysts, who debate issues about female development, and academic (non-clinical) "psychoanalytic feminists," who study gender issues and sex roles in society. She believes that the two groups focus on different questions, and frame them in different types of discourse. Her map of the terrain of the academic group, with its divisions into object relations, interpersonal, and Lacanian camps, seems more reliable than her survey of the clinical group, which omits several important recent contributors. The author is more successful in raising, rather than answering, the question of why the academics and clinicians generally show a lack of knowledge and curiosity about each other's work.

In a discussion of Chodorow's paper, Barbara S. Rocah questions her emphasis on object relations theory; while in his discussion, Bertram J. Cohler expands Chodorow's discussion of the relationship between those who study female lives as "texts" and those who study them as cases.