Helene Deutsch, Karen Homey, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein are four of the women who, according to Sayers, put the mother back at the beginning, where Freud had wanted to place father. Klein wanted to put her there with the most panache, but I’ve always been a little suspicious of her interpretations about trains and tunnels and the like. If she’s over-the-top about some of the under-the surface-meanings that can be read into the psychoses she encountered in her patients, Deutsch and Horney in their earlier work are sometimes breathtakingly presumptuous, but behind the presumption, so many interesting ideas lurk. That, it seems to me, is psychoanalysis in a nutshell, if you take my meaning.

Sayers is informative and, while clearly on side with these four women and their work, gives sufficient insights into their private lives to show how their ideas were closely linked to their experience at the level of their relationships with family and friends. The movement from the specific to the general (I hate my mother ergo women hate their mothers – nothing quite that simple, but almost), is frighteningly rapid. Psychoanalysis is so tantalising.