Jeffrey Berman has written an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book about the way in which psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have been portrayed in the fiction of eight twentieth-century writers and one writer from the late nineteenth century.

Berman begins with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose father deserted the family when she was six and whose mother waited fruitlessly for him to return until she died. As Berman shows, Gilman identified with the active, successful, absent father and spent her life:

critiquing motherhood. The attack was relentless. She condemned the cult of home and domesticity with a power that none of her contemporaries could match.