Success and the Fear of Success in Women: A Developmental and Psychodynamic Perspective (the Master Work Series)

Dr. Krueger, a nationally-known psychoanalyst, examines oedipal issues at the day-to-day level of child development and parental conditioning, exploring how they affect sexual identification and healthy gender relationships in school, career, mate selection, and parenting. Children taught to anticipate parental approval or disapproval associated with traditional gender-consistent behaviors will tend to cling throughout life to those attitudes and behaviors which gained favor during childhood from the people who represented authority and affection and avoid behaviors associated with reproach and withdrawal of affection. Dr. Krueger argues that women who received overt love and support in childhood from fathers when they displayed traditional submissive female traits and experienced disapproval when they showed the assertive, aggressive, or independent qualities regularly fostered in males, will often sabotage their own impending success in such crucial adult endeavors as career development for fear of mobilizing negative responses and rejection from authority figures unconsciously associated with their powerful fathers. Such women fear that they will lose love and the rewards of dependency if they succeed in a masculine-dominated culture. In this landmark study, Dr. Krueger develops a clear and cogent argument for sensitivity and nurturance by parents, particularly fathers, toward the needs of female children to display both dependency and self-assertiveness when preparing their young for emotional and material success in the adult world.