Female Ego Ideal Conflicts in Adulthood

All women carry inside them an image of the person they would like to be, against which they measure themselves, both consciously and unconsciously. This is the female ego ideal, which derives from identification with parents and other early environmental figures as they are or were in the past or as they have been idealized. To the extent that the actual self falls short of the ego ideal, the woman's self-esteem suffers.

Female ego ideal conflicts can occur throughout a woman's life cycle. This paper will focus on those that frequently emerge in women during their twenties, thirties, and forties, as they make decisions about motherhood and careers. These conflicts can manifest clinically by psychosomatic problems, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, work inhibitions, repressed and overt anger, irritability, fatigue, and running away from situations, as well as numerous other symptoms.

While the family constellation and dynamics and the peer group and miniculture become important in the woman's later ego ideal development, the internal conflicts discussed here arise from a woman's interaction with her mothering person in the early years of life. The importance of external factors, including economic situation, ethnic background, urban vs. rural life-style, extended support systems, and so forth, is recognized, and it is stressed that these not be discounted in treatment. Of necessity they cannot be examined in a paper of this length. Clearly these, and all relevant external factors, add to or lessen the strength of a woman's internal conflicts, and patients must be helped to separate out and clarify the interwoven internal and external factors that add up to the conflicts being experienced.

The ego ideal is considered to be part of the superego and to develop along the same lines. Harold Blum (1976) has stated that the maternal ego ideal-those values and identifications from the early mother and