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This outstanding book explores the psychiatric boom in America after World War II. Walker identifies this movement as “psychoanalytic psychiatry,” borrowing the term from Clarence Oberndorf's History of Psychoanalysis in America. “In America up to the present day,” she explains, “one may hardly speak of psychoanalysis without speaking of its medical umbrella, psychiatry, or, conversely, speak of psychiatry without speaking of its theoretical basis, psychoanalysis” (p. 4). This interest in analysis coincided with “the growth of American medicine and the psychiatric specialty overall, and…the enthusiastic popular reception of psychiatry as a general panacea” (p. 2).
In the book's first chapter, Walker provides a lucid and informative overview of the rise of psychoanalysis in the postwar era. Walker never loses the clarity and direction of her argument as she presents a mountain of data in over 100 footnotes, all testifying to the surge of interest in psychoanalysis in this period. Walker pays primary attention to the place of women in these new conceptions of psychoanalysis and how women as both patients and analysts were depicted in films about psychiatry. While in fact men were analysands at least as much as women, women were generally represented as patients of male psychiatrists in medical and popular literature, in films, and in advertisements for psychiatric drugs that addressed themselves to male doctors and were often laid out as the male doctor's visual point-of-view of the female patient.
Walker indicates that discourses of psychiatry tended to equate a woman's psychic health with her role as wife and mother. “Book after book,” she writes, “exhorts the woman to take a submissive position to her husband….To be a proper wife a woman must not only ‘learn something’ about preparing appetizing meals, but she