THE ABERRATION is a disturbing story that chronicles the near dissolution of Karcher and Witte's young marriage by an unethical female psychiatrist in Portland who seduces Karcher through hypnotherapy. Emotionally crippled by alcoholic parents, a parade of nannies who doubled as his mother's lovers, and the suicide of his masculine mother, Karcher is an easy mark. Within weeks, the doctor has him hooked and so confused, he believes his wife is the one who controls him. But there is always hope. The book is buoyed by narrator Karcher's unsteady progress toward reconciliation --with his deceased mother, his wife and himself -- and by the firm grounding provided him by his centered wife and her Maine parents.