- ture, fully functioning woman, a woman who has realized
the better part of her potentialities, who knows how to achieve and handle love and happiness, who has won through to a fully satisfying mental and sexual life.
I very frequently draw a word portrait of such a woman for patients who come to consult me about their sexual problem. It often makes them angry, and they deeply resent some of the characteristics of this idealized woman. They call her all sorts of names: "a victim of the male," "an impossible ideal." One eloquent younger woman called her "a faceless tramp," and I have heard older women, brought up under a more inhibited code than exists now, call her "a shameless hussy."
And yet despite the hostility that my portrait is often greeted with there is soon other evidence in my troubled listeners that they have been touched deeply by the idea that such a picture of womanhood might conceivably be a possibility for them. "Do you really think I could ever get to be anything like that?" The yearning question, phrased in any number of wistful ways, will inevitably come, despite the obvious hostility, the bristling defenses, the fact that the speaker is scared blue of sex and motherhood and all they mean.
You see, women want to find themselves, desperately want to. And in this portrait they get a hint, often the first they have ever had, of what to aim for, of the real potential inside themselves.
I call this subject of my sketch "idealized," and she is. But I want to emphasize that she is not a personal idle daydream of my own, based on airy nothingness; very much the contrary. Her characteristics are based on exact and thoroughly checked psychological and biological facts, facts upon which the leading scientists in this field are in general agreement. And she is a composite based on observations of
