Deconstructing the Unconscious Saboteur: Composing a Life with Ambition and Desire1

This paper explores the unconscious roots of women's ambition from an object relations, developmental, and hermaneutic perspective. Three high-profile women's stories illustrate the formative and deformative power of narration: those of Hilary Clinton, Tina Turner, and the heroine of Phantom of the Opera. Each narrative reveals typical deformative constrictions to the expression of female ambition, including male abrogation of female capability and the denigration of ambition as unfeminine. Through clinical vignettes, this paper explores dynamic, developmental, and cultural forces that block female ambition's full flowering. Part of the need to keep women's ambition limited stems from the unconscious needs of the masculine psyche for superiority. This is communicated to little girls through their mothers' internalized parental imagoes, including their mothers' identification with their mothers and their own oedipal struggles. Similarly, the father's unconscious anxieties in relation to his parental imagoes, particularly his preoedipal and oedipal relations with his mother, are communicated. Another constraining dynamic relates to female conflicts around separation from the mother. Composing new narratives of women's ambition with our patients can incorporate the uniquely feminine aspects of comfort with diffusion, while weaving multiple and disparate strands laced with nurturance and aggression.