ABSTRACT
Janet Sayers’s Mothers of Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein 1 is a miracle of a book. The author 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 couild 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 theoretical subjects and helped promote work that is now widely accepted professionally.
