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This is a miracle of a book. The author, who teaches at the University of Canterbury in Kent, has woven together the intellectual biographies of four notable women from the early history of psychoanalysis, in order to link their individual ideas to their respective lives, and at the same time show us how they succeeded as a group in shifting the center of gravity of Freud's school. I have long suspected that Freud himself would not have published on female psychology in the 1920s if he had not felt that he had pioneering women in his movement who were about to jump the gun on this critical area of his subject. And so Freud ventured forth and was to provide critics with a notable stick by which they could later beat all his psychological constructions. Each of these early women analysts in Mothers of Psychoanalysis were full of ideas about a wide range of clinical and theoreti-cal subjects and helped promote work that is now widely accepted professionally.
Janet Sayers does not herself indulge in any of the political phrase-making that has, I think, marred so much of contemporary feminist thought. She has written a series of essays in intellectual history and successfully tied them all together. The book will seem dense at spots to some, and perhaps elementary to others in separate sections, but I consider it