The author addresses herself to some of the core problems in the psychosexual development of women in the light of recent sexological and post-Freudian psychoanalytic investigations on superego development, the discovery of the vagina, the significance of penis envy, the role of the father, the unequal valuation of male and female children, masochism, and narcissism. Changes which have taken place in the social definition and in the self-conception of women within recent decades have drawn attention to the societal matrix of sex roles behind the pseudo-natural determinants of ontogenesis.