John Stuart Mill was one of the most eminent minds of the nineteenth century. At the age of twenty he went through a “mental crisis,” as he called it, and when he emerged from that crisis he found deep love. A great deal of creative output followed this episode, including the writing of The Subjection of Women (SW). I hypothesize that at the root of Mill's crisis was an unconscious death wish (Freud 1900; Klein 1937) against his father to whom he was subjugated. Through his crisis, his dependency was raised to consciousness and through a confrontation of his conscious attitude with his unconscious mind (Jung 1960) came a transformation of both his consciousness and unconscious that created a new attitude, which in turn generated a creative surge over the next many years as well as a deeply loving relationship with his wife. He was able to develop both a mutually loving relationship and loved himself developing a “loving-self” (Natterson 2014). At the same time, his insecure attachment to his mother made him vulnerable to being bullied (Koiv, 2012) and this had a stable pattern (Troy and Sroufe 1987), as he was bullied by his father and later by his wife. I also posit that in the writing of SW, which was the strongest nineteenth-century argument for expanding women's opportunities for employment, education, and suffrage, Mill identified with the subjection of his mother to his father, as well as with the subjection of women in general. Additionally, his claim of male-female equality in SW was a defense against becoming fully masculine.