Was Freud Wrong about Feminine Psychology?

“Oh, I would like to get in a car and be driven off into the mountains to a cabin on a wind-howling hill and be raped in a huge lust like a cave woman, fighting, screaming, biting in a ferocious ecstasy of orgasm.”… That sounds nice doesn't it? Really delicate and feminine.

Sylvia Plath, the author of these lines, made a serious suicide attempt in 1953 a few months after she wrote them, and a successful suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. A couple of years earlier she came across Freud's Mourning and Melancholia and considered it “an almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide.” This incredibly talented, narcissistic, and introspective young woman reportedly identified in herself the “vampire” metaphor Freud used; she called it “a transferred and murderous impulse from my mother onto myself,” which then she imagined as-borrowing Freud's phrase-“draining the ego.” She called it “Mother's clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hatred of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions in myself. …” There is much in her journals that identifies catastrophic rage as the basic problem of her pathology and lends credence to Kernberg's argument that the grandiose self is a pathological formation helping the patient to protect against this rage. Yet this same author (1) also described herself as “fragmented,” suffered from mood swings that would interest a biological psychiatrist, and, at the low point of her personal life after separation from her idealized husband, wrote her greatest creative work-the poems of Ariel—“in a flood of incandescent energy, thirty poems in one month” (p. 357). What can we learn from such deeply pathological and incredibly complex women-who so remarkably fit the formulations of Freud and lend themselves so well to the theories of Kernberg and Kohut-about the psychology of the normal woman? Can a