In Couching Resistance, Janet Walker examines professional and popular literature published between World War II and the mid-1960's to develop a picture of psychiatry's ambivalent response to women patients. This ambivalence, Walker argues, is also evident in the profusion of Hollywood films form the same period on the subject of psychiatry and women. Even though in many cases men and women made up an equal number of patients, medical and fictional psychiatry often relied on the adjustment of "deviant" women in order to present their respective solutions.