The Liberated Woman: Healthy and Neurotic

In the past eight to ten years we have witnessed a new wave of progress in the efforts of women to assert their identity as full and separate human beings. Many women have been stimulated to think about themselves in a new way and are trying to give up some of their dependent needs in an effort to experience further growth, separation, and self-realization. Some of their efforts are truly liberating and others are confused and self-defeating. Some women are taking advantage of the wider opportunities which are becoming available to them, others are unable to. These latter women are often immobilized by despair of not overcoming their feelings of inadequacy, or by a sterile, impotent rage against the world, looking for reparations for what they feel men have done to them.

In working with patients, I have seen many varieties of women's efforts to free themselves, both healthy and neurotic, and some of those efforts will be discussed here. Before going into the clinical material however, I shall describe briefly some of the factors that have contributed to women's present difficulties.

Traditional attitudes toward women, implying that they need special care and protection, that they are relatively frail, that they are not as capable in “worldly” activities as men, have had a specific harmful effect on their emotional growth and development and on their concept of self. This harmful effect on their growth can be called the psychology of submission, and I would like to develop some of its aspects.

Pressures of society have restricted women to developing only about one-third of their potential, rather than developing in all dimensions according to their genetic endowment, predisposition, and opportunity. The concepts of Karen Horney^{1, 2} are particularly helpful in understanding this process and its long-range effects. Horney recognized that from birth all humans have needs and potentialities in three main areas: dependency, detachment, and expansiveness. Healthy growth invol