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From an ego-psychological perspective it can be seen how women will form their personal identities from the same identity mechanisms as those of men but by interacting with a cultural environment which denies them, as women, the imaginary models that nurture competence, genius, and transcendence.
How to speak of developmental and relational processes in ways that privilege women's experiences is central in feminist writings. Lacking in most of this literature is a dynamic psychological language capable of sharpening the critical edge of the feminist analyses of women's subjectivities and relational experiences. Furthermore, many feminist authors are highly suspicious of the constructive potential of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Self psychology weathers the feminist critique of psychoanalysis. It offers the weight of an experientially based theory in which to situate the feminist concerns of conceptualizing subjectivity as gendered. Self psychology contains the expansive possibilities of articulating aspects of feminist theory in a language that can be gender sensitive. Self psychology, in collaboration with intersubjectivity theory, has the potential to reclaim the complex and lifelong significance of female relationships without invoking the reductionist fallacy of construing them as narrowly genital or regressive. Notions of self–selfobject relations, intersubjective