The Headshrinker's Test

by Sue Kaufman

1 HARDCOVER BOOK, NO DUST COVER

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Kaufman was born in Long Island, New York. She received her degree from Vassar College in 1947. In 1953 she married a doctor named Jeremiah Abraham Barondess with whom she had a son. At Vasser she did some editorial work and went on to writing. Her works appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and The Saturday Evening Post. Her first novel came out in 1959. In 1967 she wrote Diary of a Mad Housewife, which would be filmed as Diary of a Mad Housewife. She died in Manhattan in 1977, at the age of 50, after a long illness.[1] The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction is named in her honor.

Reviews

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot believe that the blurbs on this book from the Boston Evening Globe and Harper's refer to The Headshrinker's Test. Neither names the book and they both indicate a comic sensibility, referring to "Miss Kaufman's humor" and stating "Miss Kaufman is a slyly funny writer" respectively.

Unlike Diary of a Mad Housewife, The Headshrinker's Test is not a comedy of manners or of any other kind - it's more a psychological study of the male narrator, Julian Corder, inside whose head the reader is trapped for the entire novel. It documents his courtship and first year of marriage to Prudence, a younger woman who has daily sessions with Dr. Rheinmuhth, a psychoanalyst who remains unseen for almost the entire novel. Julian becomes increasingly obsessed with Rheinmuhth, who he perceives as Svengali to Prudence's Trilby, controlling her actions and indirectly manipulating Julian through them. Julian's misogyny takes on increasingly violent imagery in his thoughts, though it only once results in actual domestic violence. The novel's ending leaves the story unresolved, as Julian bides his time waiting for the moment when he will unleash deadly violence on Dr. Rheinmuhth, with a Mauser once belonging to his dead brother, a Chekovian gun that makes an early appearance, remains unmentioned for over a hundred pages, but is ultimately never fired within the novel.

The novel moves at a slow pace, and Julian, despite his witty sarcasm, proves an increasingly unpleasant character, As with Mad Housewife, Kaufman subjects Prudence to a kind of affluent domestic servitude, devoting significant time and worry to various trivialities of housekeeping, but without stating or, as far as I could see, even implying any kind of feminist critique.