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Professor Hirsch is one of those privileged few who were able to evolve their ideas about psychoanalysis and feminism in the “halls of ivy” with the aid of grants. Though Hirsch appears to be passionately devoted to her ideas and has worked diligently to integrate them, there is a peculiarly cloistered, though always scholarly, air about her book, The Mother/Daughter Plot. She, however, has set herself a formidable task: She wishes to examine from both a feminist and psychoanalytic position how narrative about mothers and daughters evolves in literary plots. Like many other academicians, she wishes to use psychoanalysis as an investigative tool. And here the trouble begins. She splinters psychoanalysis into fragments, leaving aside one of its most important aspects, namely, free association. She relies, instead, on the cognitive structure of analytic developmental theory, though only when it suits her. At other times, such as when she discusses the various forms of “family romance” she has discovered in her research, she leaves even that aside.
Hirsch narrows her analytic horizon further by using Freud's (1909) paper “Family Romances” as a baseline from which to view her assertions. This narrowing could fit in well with her ideas about feminism inasmuch as Freud states that “pater semper incertus est, while the mother is certissimd” (p. 239), which could mean that mother is all important. But in Freud's view, over the various developmental stages the fantasy about one's origin undergoes many transformations, which are said to leave girls with a weaker imagination. The various battles around what these transformations can mean to a young girl and how she responds to them are clearly and concisely, not to say empathically, depicted by Hirsch. She uses the title of Freud's short paper as a guideline to