What Does Psychoanalytic Theory and Application Have to Offer the Women of Workforce 2000?

ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented organizational practitioners have made considerable progress over the last four decades in the exploration and interpretation of organizational behavior. Theory, research, and application have been quite illuminating, particularly in the areas of management, leadership, personality, and group dynamics. However, not surprisingly, most of what has been learned about organizations has come from the study of men and their work in male-dominated institutions.

Exploration of the experience and meaning of professional work for women has only received serious consideration in the last fifteen years and has been researched largely from social and organizational psychology and management theory perspectives. There are many obvious reasons for the present lack of psychoanalytic contribution. First, psychoanalysts traditional and feminist, have not as of yet, been able to integrate and communicate a more or less unified theory of female psychology. Second, women's place in the field of work has only recently changed from being almost exclusively in support of and subordinate to men. Third, the giants in the field of applied organizational psychoanalysis have been almost exclusively male and, understandably, they have focused on what the marketplace required and what they knew best - the world of men and their work.

The situations and circumstances impacting women in male-dominated, glass ceiling-intact companies have been well-documented particularly by organizational and management theorists such as Kanter, Jardim, and Morrison. Likewise, the internal conflicts that women experience regarding work and issues of gender have been explored in challenging and provocative ways by a number of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theorists such as Person, Applegarth, Stiver, and Baker Miller. The scope that psychoanalytic observations and interpretations can bring are clearly absent from otherwise enlightened and provocative theories and interventions such as Kanter's and this limits the potential of their application. An integration of these perspectives promises a deeper understanding of the issues involving women and their work.

This paper reviews the themes and issues resulting from a variety of consulting projects to businesses and women's organizations and coaching to teams and individuals. The client base is drawn largely from male-dominated industries of finance and technology and individuals with few exceptions are white, well-educated senior level women and men.

The self-concept of senior level women in these fields suffers from the devaluation they experience in the workplace. They are usually not included in upper management, are under representative of the percentage of women in their departments, are paid less and given less critical roles than the men, even when they are promoted. The polarization of the sexes is extreme and the cultures are highly regressive and aggressive. The defensive responses of the women were examined as well as their development of unproductive work styles that collude unconsciously with the male agenda to control them and their career aspirations. Special focus centers on workplace threats to women's desires for interconnectedness, activation of unconscious guilt, the threat to the ego ideal created by the tension between work and family, identification with the male aggressor, anger, and power.

The psychoanalytic perspective has much to offer the women of Workforce 2000-the women leaving Fortune companies to start their own corporations and small businesses and the women who stay and continue to try and crack the glass ceiling. More research and application must be forthcoming to meet this challenge. Overall, it is argued that the response to Freud's question "What do women want?" has the same answer that he offered men regarding their happiness and well-being. They want "to love and to work." Furthermore, the gender conflict in organizations - the forced separation of that which is exclusively feminine from that which is exclusively masculine - was identified as an area ripe for psychoanalytic intervention.

INTRODUCTION

Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented organizational practitioners have made considerable progress over the last four decades in the exploration and interpretation of organizational behavior. Their efforts have resulted in an in-depth understanding of the complexities of contemporary organizations and the complications they can create for employees. Theory, research, and application have been quite illuminating, particularly in the areas of management, leadership, personality characteristics, group dynamics, stress, and executive emotional health. However, not surprisingly, most of what has been learned about organizations has come from the study of men and their work in male-dominated institutions.

Exploration of the experience and meaning of professional work for women has only received serious consideration in the past fifteen years and has been researched largely from social and organizational psychology and management theory perspectives. There are many obvious reasons for the scarcity of psychoanalytic contribution and it will be useful to consider each of these reasons in some depth.

THE HISTORY

First, psychoanalysts, traditional and feminist, have not as of yet, been able to integrate and communicate a more or less unified theory of female psychology let alone apply it to working women. Concerns that traditional psychoanalytic theory was limited in relevance and applicability to women were brought to Freud's attention early by Karen Horney (1924). Horney enlarged the concept of penis envy to include secondary penis envy which was viewed as a defensive response to hostile impulses toward men and the male advantage in the family and society (Stiver, 1991). For her efforts, she was ostracized from the psychoanalytic community. Clara Thompson (1943) suffered a similar fate when she expanded the theory of penis envy to include cultural influence by pointing at "the general competitive tendencies in our culture, which stimulate envy and the tendency to place an inferior evaluation on women" (Stiver 1991, p. 104).

Freud knew that his theories of women were not complete. "The issue is not that Freud valued and respected women," writes Chehrazi (1987), "but that, in spite of his genius and invaluable contributions, he did not have enough information regarding early preoedipal development in girls, something that he pointed out himself (1933)." Stoller (1968), Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976), Kleeman (1971, 1976) and others have provided the information that confirms that little girls have knowledge of their gender prior to two years of age and begin to formulate a concept of female identity prior to their traumatic realization that they are penisless and that this can shift the focus so as Chehrazi puts it, "the little girl will soon come to value what she herself has and relinquish the envy of what she does not have" (1987, p.24).

The school of object relations (Fairbairn, Winnicott, Klein) also contributed to the psychoanalytic theory of women by enlarging traditional drive theory to encompass a primary drive to create relationships. This adaptation became the cornerstone of Chodorow's (1978,1989,1994) work on gender development, in particular, the relational theory of female development. Dinnerstein (1977) also argued along these lines that the earliest object relationships with caretakers, who are usually female and more often mother, form the basis for a sense of self.

Schafer (1974), Blum (1976), and the developmental psychologist Gilligan (1982) focused on the original Freudian notion that women developed defective superegos.

Building on relational theory, Gilligan has formulated a theory of different but equal moral values, with male moral development centering on law and female development focusing on relationships. Baker-Miller's (1986) provocative vision "Toward a New Psychology of Women" and subsequent work (1991) raised issues about the discrepancies between the clinical experience of women and psychoanalytic theory and technique as well as pertinent social psychological issues such as women and power, women and anger, violence against women, vulnerability and devaluation of women.

Regarding women and their desire to work, Applegarth (1986) states that only recently has psychoanalysis changed its view that "women's strivings toward a career represent misdirection of normal drives and, in general, are the expressions of masculine currents" (p.212). Besides sublimating drives and gratifying narcissism, "For both sexes, work clearly also satisfies important social needs as well as the working out of important object relations" (p.213). Person (1983) makes the argument that psychoanalysis as a theory had to endure a major paradigm shift in order to begin to assimilate the various changes in the theory of female development that were being offered over the years. In addition to recognizing its biases regarding women, it was necessary for psychoanalytic theory to develop "the ability to theorize the interaction between individual psychology and the cultural milieu" (p.643). Women and their desire for satisfying and fulfilling work were available for comprehensive study now that the theoretical changes in the psychoanalytic view of women "[freed] the concept of normative femininity from the stereotypes of passivity, masochism, dependency, and narcissism" (p.634).

These theorists and many others, for this is far from an exhaustive summary of the work in this area, have shed light and complicated further our understanding of the psychology of women. With remarkable resiliency, psychoanalytic theory today continues to assimilate and consider multiple variations and modifications with a spirit that is more reminiscent of Freud than his limitations. But there is still far from universal agreement on these issues and from some sectors there is criticism and dissension. Lerman (1987) and others feel strongly that psychoanalysis is flawed beyond salvage with male egocentrism. Other more traditional analysts contend that Chodorow and other relational theorists have thrown the baby out with the bath.

If this amount of diversity weren't enough, consider theoretical and research contributions from other psychological disciplines. Gilligan has been mentioned for her large contribution which attempts some integration between analytic/relational theory and developmental psychology. The life-span social developmentalists have made provocative studies of women and careers over time (Levinson 1996, Hulbert & Schuster 1993, Helson 1967, 1993, Turner & Troll 1994, Tomlinson-Keasey 1990). Huyck (1994) very creatively integrates psychoanalytic theory with a life span approach to study gender identity in women in later life. Social psychologists Tavris (1992) and Eagly (1987) and many others have focused on misconceptions of gender differences. Campbell (1993) has studied the differences between women and men regarding anger and aggression. Remaining to be integrated are perhaps the larger contributions directly related to women in the workplace from sociology and education (Almquist 1974, Angrist & Almquist 1975, Angrist 1972, Giele 1978, Lorber 1993 ) and organizational psychology and management theory (Kanter 1993, Morrison et al 1992, Friedan 1963, Powell 1993, Haslett, Gies & Carter 1993, Hennig & Jardim 1978).

In summary, the first reason for significant lack of psychoanalytic contribution to the study of women in the workplace has to do with the initial reluctance of psychoanalytic theory to enlarge the psychology of women, the amount of complexity and variety among analytic views of women and the diversity of thought from other disciplines that appears overwhelmingly daunting to any attempt at integration. Eisold has said (1995) that psychoanalysts are ideally suited to study the intricacies of organizational behavior "because they are more familiar with the dilemmas of not knowing." The psychoanalytic study of women at work is a test of that belief.

A second more overriding reason that sufficient analytic exploration of the meaning and value of work to women has not been undertaken is the same reason that other disciplines lag behind in their study of women on the job as opposed to their study of men at work. Quite simply, women's place in the field of work has only recently changed from being almost exclusively in support of and subordinate to men. Although they presently outnumber men in the labor force, and their numbers will be even more daunting in the year 2000, most women will continue to work in these positions. In the Fortune 1500 companies, the percentage of women senior managers, vice-presidents and above has only risen from 3% to 5% from 1984 to 1994.

When the overall history of women at work is considered, the present situation is more comprehensible. The patriarchal social and legal and religious systems of western societies made it impossible for women to be gainfully employed. The recent rebirth of Jane Austen's heroines on film reminds us that English Common Law, which governed America until after the revolution, prohibited women from entering contracts, making court appearances or inheriting wealth without approval. Women could only run shops or farms if their husbands died young. Before the Industrial Revolution when the economic system in America was largely agricultural, the disparity between women's work and men's work was not as problematic. Men for the most part did the farm and field "heavy" labor while the women made clothes and cooked and prepared food. When the men were able to realize a profit for some of the produce and goods they created, they began to bring outside money into the home. This changed the perception of the value of work being done by women and men and historical patriarchal values became strong again. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, enough laws were in place in America that made wives under the legal rule of their husbands (Powell, 1993).

Eventually, when women were employed outside the home as they were in textile mills, they were largely poor widows, single girls, or the wives of poor men. It had already become a mark of status for a man to have a stay-at-home wife. Women were paid lower wages than men and served in the most menial and monotonous posts (Powell, 1993). The conditions of unsafety and danger that women toiled in have been well-chronicled by accounts of events such as the 1860 Massachusetts mill collapse and New York's Triangle Shirt Factory fire in 1911. The workplace has been a hostile environment for women from the very beginning.

By the year 1900, 19% of American women compared to 80% of American men were employed outside the home. Women made up only 4% of management or administrator positions. Despite the men going off to World War I or the right to vote being granted to women in 1920 (after more than fifty years of the suffrage movement) by 1940, the percentage of women in the workplace had only risen to 25% (Powell, 1993). After World War II, 77% of the women who had come into the workforce when the men were away at war, stated that they did not wish to leave their jobs. Political, social and cultural pressures forced many of them to go home.

Something significant, however, had occurred, not just culturally but within the minds and hearts of women who had experienced the independence and the sense of mastery that the workplace can offer. Although most of them in the 1950s went into suburban dream worlds of Westinghouse appliances and husbands who commuted in gray flannel suits, some stayed behind in the factories and offices and explored life as working girls. Eventually, the women's movement of the '60s and '70s resulted in more than 50% of American women joining the work force by 1980. The largest increase of working women due to the women's movement was, not surprisingly, white, middle-class, well-educated females. The value and importance of work to these women was going to be different from those of single and poor women who first ventured forth into the mill or factory.

Significant change was also happening within marriages and families. By 1988, over 50% of married women were working and by 1990, the majority of mothers with children between the ages of 2 and 17 were employed (Powell,1993). Women were now working for many reasons other than survival. They were also not working, for the most part to pay for luxuries for the family which was a well-known male-ego preserving excuse of the '50s. They were working to support families like men. They were working to be financially independent like men. They were working to use their minds, be masters of their fate, follow their dreams, pursue their passions like men.

When the work history of women is reviewed in such a manner, it is obvious that women have made tremendous progress in wrestling away from the patriarchal society the exclusivity of the right to work. However, as noted earlier, there is widespread agreement that women still have not reached the upper echelons of any profession in measurable number. The concepts of token women, the glass ceiling, unequal pay, are strong realities for most working women. When the New York Times reported the findings of the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission on March 17, 1995, it was not surprising to women and other minorities, that the findings cited "the entrenched stereotypes and prejudices of white men" as the major deterrent to minority advancement in the workplace.

The issues and dynamics impacting women in male-dominated, glass ceiling-intact companies have been well-documented particularly by organizational and management theorists such as Kanter, Morrison, and others. Likewise, as discussed earlier, the internal conflicts that women experience regarding work and issues of gender have been explored somewhat by a number of psychoanalytic theorists such as Applegarth, Stiver, Baker-Miller, Person and others. The scope that psychoanalytic observations and interpretations and interventions can bring are clearly absent from otherwise enlightened and provocative study of women in the workplace and this limits the potential of their application. An integration of these perspectives promises a deeper understanding of the issues involving women and their work and the gender dynamics that are at play in keeping the glass ceiling intact. For example, gender initiatives and diversity training often fall short of their goals and can in fact create more confusion, controversy, and polarization because they do not address the more substantive issues and largely unconscious and regressive dynamics that are at work in organizations. In summary, a women's world of work has, in the grand scope of history, only recently come into existence. Similarly, women's true place in psychoanalytic theory has only recently taken significant form. It is now time for them to be joined together.

Third, the giants in the field of applied organizational psychoanalysis have been almost exclusively male and, understandably, they have focused on what the marketplace required and what they knew best - the world of men and their work. Would women last in the workplace longer than the scent of their perfume as an identifiable force? It certainly seemed unclear in the '40s, '50s, and even the '60s. And when they began to accumulate and step into some positions of power did anyone want to risk studying them? Surely, many among senior male management viewed such occurrences as nightmares to be temporarily endured, so why would they pay for study and research to maintain them? Many of the women who beat the odds during these times weren't speaking up either. Why would they want to draw attention to themselves, possibly spoil their luck, create too much envy, risk the possibility of other women joining them, or break the illusion of passing for one of the boys?

The times, however, have changed drastically. The impending statistics of Workforce 2000 warn management of even the most male-dominated industries to expect a veritable tsunami of women and other minorities and permutations thereof. Although the female pipeline has not yet delivered enough resounding mass to splinter the glass ceiling despite male retrenching, enough body parts are poking through to cause concern and a considerable amount of legal litigation. (A cartoon in a recent New Yorker pictured several businessmen peering down at the women saying "Don't you hate it when they press their noses up to the glass like that?") If the march upward has been stalled, women have wasted no time in moving out in other directions. The employment growth rate of women owned businesses was 11.6% in comparison to 5.3% of the total national growth rate in the years 1991 to 1994. Already women owned businesses employ more people than do the organizations of the Fortune 1500.

The opportunity and need has emerged for strong study and application of psychoanalytic theory to the issues women face in the workplace and the troublesome gender dynamics that are in evidence due to the threats implicit in these trends for both women and men. Psychoanalysis is ideally equipped to venture into this dark unknown where perhaps the most terrifying of preoedipal and oedipal dramas are waiting to be engaged not on the home front but on the work front. There is an increasing awareness clinically, socially, politically that men can no longer cope with the culture they have created that has led to this restrictive male-dominated, "forced separation" of that which is exclusively and narrowly masculine from that which is exclusively and narrowly feminine. If a careful eye can be kept on the biases inherent in psychoanalytic theory and appropriate consideration and inclusion of women's developmental distinctions from men can be made, as discussed earlier, the best of what has been applied to men and work can be enlarged and modified to be applied to women and their work. When one reviews, for example, the prolific work of just one giant in the field, Harry Levinson, the challenge is to consider such a body of knowledge and experience for potential applicability to women's issues. Some attempts have been encouraging (Bernardez 1983, Cytrynbaum 1995, Grossman & Stewart 1990, Parker & Kram 1993, Kram & McCollum 1995) and more must be forthcoming.

THE FRAME

As I describe the themes and issues resulting from a variety of consulting projects to businesses and women's organizations and coaching to teams and individuals, I will integrate and disguise organizations and individuals to prevent any one company or individual from being recognized. The client base for this paper is drawn largely from male-dominated industries of finance and technology and individuals with few exceptions are white, well-educated, senior level women and men.

Regarding the work inhibitions of women, Person (1982) wrote: "Insofar as the barrier to success is external, one is dealing with sexism and the solution is political. Insofar as the barrier is internal, one is dealing with psychological phenomena, and the solution is individual change" (p.67). However, there is tremendous overlap because psychological phenomena in groups and organizations can create external barriers for women and external barriers can create or intensify internal barriers. It is essential to attempt to clarify this intersection for women in organizations to relieve them, as Person also wrote, of "the burden of internalizing responsibility for all failures and attributing them to personal or intellectual deficits, a pronounced tendency for women" (p.67). Furthermore, the permutations caused by the intersection of women's personal and familial histories with historical and cultural and societal influence with organizational mandates, overt and covert, and group dynamics, conscious and unconscious, compound to create the frame that contains each unique project.

The work overall was guided by the following questions and challenges:

1) What are the most useful avenues of psychoanalytic exploration and intervention that can be applied when working with women in business and with gender conflict in organizations?

2) How can psychoanalytic theory and application assist women in forming a better understanding of their own psychology and their issues in the workplace?

3) How can psychoanalytic interventions contribute to the resolution of gender inequities/conflicts in Organization 2000?

Almost without exception, organizations and individuals began the various processes with some realization that the books they had read, the training and consultants they had endured were superficial and not reaching into the depth of the issues. The leader of one women's task force said: "Please don't tell us we need assertiveness training or public speaking classes. Something else is going on here. These women can assert and speak at home, at PTA etc., but something happens at work." Another woman in a similar position stated: "Is there any way we can do this without making it look like we're fixing the women again? I know we need help with things but it starts to feel like they bought us some remedial education."

The women I encountered were hungry for a comprehensive way to understand their pain, their rage, their disappointment at lack of promotions, unequal pay, unfulfilling roles, dissatisfaction with a lack of balance between home and work, the continuing and often increasing male advantage of power and opportunity in their organizations, their lowered sense of self-esteem, their feelings of failure despite success, and a deep sense beneath their rage that it was still somehow their fault.

Since there were few integrated models available for these types of interventions with women, for the reasons described earlier, I found it useful when approaching or reviewing an assignment to remind myself to incorporate several basic and practical analytic questions that should be put forth in any psychological consulting project. I draw largely on the work of Levinson, Kets de Vries, Zaleznik, and Kernberg to provide this framework.

1) "Since all organizations are recapitulations of family structure in our culture," according to Levinson (1995), and that's why they invite regression, what might I expect when a group of senior women in a male-dominated organization are angry and dissatisfied with their positions?

2) How can I diagnose the organization at large? What can I learn about this male-dominated culture? How is it experienced by the men as well as the women? What is the overall culture, acceptable style, values, conscious and unconscious goals? Where is the sexual/aggressive energy of this organization going?

3) Are the women the only ones in pain? If so, is it reasonable to believe that there will be any incentive for the organization to change? Or has there been significant legal action or threat of legal action to leverage male management into movement? Or are there enlightened senior management members who have personal reasons for wanting a more gender equitable workplace? (One assignment was spearheaded by a man who did not want his daughters to grow up and have to face such conflicts when they entered the business world.)

4) What are the unconscious expectations (wishes, fantasies, conflicts) of the women regarding this employer? What are their unconscious expectations of this project? Likewise, what are the men's unconscious expectations?

5) What is the historical/social/cultural experience of women within this particular industry? this company?

6) What are the business and political pressures that this organization is experiencing that may be impacting the culture that may be impacting the gender issues?

7) What are the primary defensive structures utilized by the men and women working in this organization, as groups and as individuals?

8) What do I experience as a female consultant when I am with the women, when I am with the men, when I work with them together?

THE FEMALE ODYSSEY

Women left the home front to fight the wars of suffrage, sexual freedom, and the right to work. They ventured forth into the world where men had always been to begin a journey that would become ultimately a voyage homeward. The metaphor of Odysseus's journey is one of reconciling the self with the world. It is at this moment in historical/cultural time that we confront women in the workplace.

Self-Concept

" You have to prove yourself constantly - show you're technical, be aggressive, self-promote. I spend so much time trying to be what they want I can't see myself anymore so I doubt if they can see me. I'm not me and I can't be like them. I've become a blur."

Woman in a workshop

In general, I encounter women in this work who have been beaten up pretty badly by their work situations and by themselves. There's a general sense of low self-esteem, mutual devaluation, anger, depression, and hopelessness. They also present as a group somewhere between cautious and paranoid and hostile. The first order of the agenda is to take some of the guilt away that they have at being in such a miserable state. I explain the reasons why they're feeling so shaky. I state that they're a very brave group of women who are trying to do something that essentially hasn't been done before. They've been looking for guides, internal and external, to help them and there aren't any. I remind them of the following:

1) There's no universal guiding psychology of women that's been widespread and available to them.

2) There's no articulated understanding of the meaning and value of work for women.

3) The system is a male designed system that can be problematic for women for many reasons and can cause and/or reinforce many of the negative feelings they are experiencing.

4) It's even more difficult for them to deal with everything because they're blaming themselves for failing in a culture that invented the image of superwoman.

5) There are very few role models of any consequence available. (As a group member put it, "We've seen the Glamour Don'ts - who are the Glamour Do's?")

I also tell them they have real concerns that we will work on together, but that we must recognize that each of them has a unique perspective on these issues and they are not all going to feel the same about them. They all come from different backgrounds and family structures and that has a great influence on how they view the present situations. I suggest that as the project begins each one commence with "putting her individual psychological house in order." The following will describe many of the issues/conflicts encountered by the women in these organizations.

Penis Envy

Many of the cultural atmospheres that I have been exposed to in the financial and technical fields have been highly regressive, where the men running the departments, for example, sales and trading, technology, investment banking, have been extremely competitive, aggressive, devaluing of women, and controlling of women into powerless positions. In such highly charged environments, a sharp polarization of the sexes occurs. Senior level women are usually not included in upper management, are a minority in general and under representative of the percentage of women in the department, are paid less and given less critical roles than the men, even when they are promoted. What each individual woman's response to this set-up for regression and recapitulation will be depends to a large extent on what her experience of being female was in relation to her mother.

A little girl forms an identification with her mother preoedipally that creates a sense of herself as female. If she experiences her mother as lacking or destructive, she will experience not only her mother ambivalently but also herself because of this identification. Eventually, when she becomes aware of the anatomical differences between herself and little boys and experiences a penis envy reaction, modern theory holds that she will be aided in her resolution of this conflict by realizing "the value of what she herself has and [will] relinquish the envy of what she does not have" (Chezrahi, 1987, p.24 ). How mother has influenced her perception of what she has will be important in how she deals with her envy. If mother is conflicted about the value of her femininity and halts the girl's exploration and appreciation of her genitals, and therefore her gender identity, or idealizes the father and male siblings, the girl will focus on what she has not, since it will remain blurry in comparison to the boy's obvious and enviable penis profile. If mother is further seen as devalued or perhaps abused, what she is missing may take precedence for her, especially if the father is seen as the one powerful enough to wield the abuse. In addition, if the envy is more of the envy of penis as metaphor (and some modern theorists argue that is all it ever is in most women) for obvious and extreme male advantage, privilege, and supremacy in the family and supporting systems, the trauma will be significant and resolution problematic.

The regressive pull toward phallic supremacy in many of these organizations is so extreme that it is unlikely that even the most stable and secure women will be unaffected by envy in face of such obvious male advantage. Chezrahi (1987) notes "It may be that the concomitant de-idealization of the penis is also necessary as part of the process of partial or complete mastery and resolution of penis envy. We are familiar with how idealization is an essential part of the envy....The idealization of men and the relation between their superior "capabilities" and their having a penis is often readily brought up by women patients" (p.25). The women often participated in the idealization and their envy was quite visible. The language of the street was widely used by males and females alike - who was the "big swinging dick of the day," referred to the doer of the biggest deal or trade. The jokes were strongly phallic, off-color, and degrading to women.

Women were presented as lacking in a variety of areas. In a study of the information technology industry conducted by Deloitte and Touche, three myths held by men were identified as major contributors to the women's lack of advancement in that industry:

1) women lack technical competence equal to men

2) women lack the toughness to compete

3) women won't work the long hours required

(Datamation, January 15, 1995, p.83)

Many women acknowledged the existence of these myths. Sometimes they would be angry at the perception that they were less technically competent, sometimes they would question their own abilities despite educational and professional accomplishments. Some would clearly cross the line and attempt to become as aggressive, as tough as the men, to prove a point - "curse, threaten, scream, pound the table." Others would retreat to total passivity. Sometimes one woman would vacillate between both strategies. The issue of long hours was particularly problematic for working mothers. They resented the macho dictum of "He who works the most hours wins" since so much of it was nonproductive face-time. (Charles Hampden-Turner (1996) recently coined the phrase "presenteeism" to describe the new emphasis on face-time as opposed to the old focus on workplace absenteeism.)

The obvious manifestations of envy/idealization presented by many of these women in male-dominated industries was largely a reaction formation against the aggressive impulses they felt toward the men for their privileged position and their control. They would disguise the rage by focusing on themselves as oppressed victims and viewing themselves as failing and not measuring up. An example of this often took the form of focusing on what the men's responses were to the women's complaints, how would the consultant speak to the men so as not to offend them, etc. Another example was the blatant self-sabotage of a particular initiative that a group of women had persuaded the men to let them lead. In some instances, individual work with some of the women revealed personal histories that complicated the retraumatization. One woman had five brothers and spent most of her life trying to pass as her father's sixth son, as she put it, and with her father's encouragement. She had been a tomboy, surpassed her brothers in the knowledge of math and science and done very well professionally, until her career stalled in a particularly regressed investment banking department. The stimulation of the envy she had held in denial was so great that she became depressed and somewhat dysfunctional. She experienced a great sense of humiliation at finally being found out to be a girl in her department. She described a particular moment wherein as the only female at an all male meeting, she "went over the top" in her rendering of a sexual joke. "I knew I had crossed a line in how hard I was trying to be one of them that I could say something as sick as I did about women."

When Horney first wrote about penis envy as a defensive formation in girls, she postulated that it would not endure into later life as would the male envy of motherhood (Stiver, 1991, p.104). It makes intuitive sense that men would have to regrapple with such envy in adulthood when the stimulus for it would be most apparent - little girls don't become mothers and rear children - adult females do. Similarly, now that women enter the male-dominated world of work, the penis envy complex formation has more longevity. When women were safe within their private worlds of home and childrearing, they only had to deal with the perceived advantage of their husband's position, and especially if their husbands were not devaluing and abusive, they could seek solace in the advantages of being female and having and rearing children and working at home. However, when thrust into minority status in the workplace, a woman becomes all too aware once again of what she does not have and this is likely to give renewed strength to the resurrected thought-to-be extinguished flame of penis envy. What she is able to achieve in terms of power and opportunity as a female may be far less than her male cohorts and she is left with a profound sense of being deficient.

Where The Boys Are

Most of the men encountered in these organizations were obviously in strong states of hypercathexis of their masculinity. They had created cultures that were fast, unrelenting, and unforgiving. Hours were long, stakes were high, the game was to be played hard and won at any cost. The polarization of the sexes was extreme and a strong projective identification of anything vulnerable, dependent, passive, insecure, was hoisted onto the women. One particular group of males on a trading floor were notorious for their fraternity house antics. In the '80s, they had been the young Turks of Wall Street, working and playing hard, with profits that bought immunity for their behavior. In the '90s, this particular group became the senior management of the floor, but they were reluctant to give up their past behavior and the hold on their "glory days".

Interviews with this core group revealed men who were largely from blue collar families, had had typically absent, and sometimes actually missing fathers, and had financially far surpassed their parents, siblings, and extended family members. Their unconscious struggles were many: guilt over surpassing father and brothers, fear of not being man enough in a white collar job, rage at the father and guilt at the wish to destroy him, unresolved feelings of humiliation at the poverty and powerlessness experienced in childhood. These were compounded by a marketplace in great flux and political decision-making and reorganization within the companies that could leave any of them without a job at any moment. They were literally railing against their fears and insecurities, equipped only to deny, deflect, project, and inflict their pain on others, and the women were suitable targets. As can be surmised by the discussion so far of the types of conflicts the women were experiencing, the dynamics were ripe between the men and the women to create conflict regarding gender issues in the workplace. It is precisely because more or less of these dynamics will exist within any group of men and women that work/gender issues are so difficult to explore, let alone resolve.

In a discussion of regression in groups, Diamond (1991) outlines how individuals in groups can lose their separate identities and merge with the group bond and purpose. He explains: "Regressive behavior in the individual is the result of anxiety provoked by an unstable, inconsistent, insecure or hostile external world (fantasized or actual)... some individuals bring to the work group or organization excessive demands for association that represent a compensatory need for a sense of self and identity that is otherwise lacking. Unconsciously, they expect the group or organization to provide them with the stable, all-loving holding environment absent from their past" (p.194). Why do groups regress? Diamond writes, "It is essentially a protective reaction, preserving the self from annihilation."

As mentioned, many of these men came from homes where father was not there for them in any substantial way. The group becomes the father "holding environment," essential to ward off the threat of the feminine from within and without. Diamond (1991) describes the autocratic work group wherein members "identify with an all-powerful charismatic leader from whom they derive control of their aggression and anxiety" (p.205). He compares this group to Freud's primal horde. The group can "project their aggression outside the group boundaries" and "relies on identification with the aggressor" as a defense. All of these male groups had the essential charismatic leader who was reminiscent of the gang leader from high school, the president of the frat house, the tough, cocky, ultra-masculine bad boy surrounded by an inner circle of chief lieutenants. Upon the designer suits and expensive cars, they superimposed the mores and values of absent blue-collar fathers who believed a woman's place was in the home.

A particularly interesting issue that forms the core of much gender discrepancy at work has to do with pregnancy, maternity leave, and childcare. The women were justifiably concerned about their abilities to balance work and family commitments in such industries. Some women made incredible sacrifices to maintain their jobs and raise families. They hired help, spent little weekday time with their children, worked from home during weekends and still felt that they were perceived as slacking off. Others were visibly conflicted and did not always manage the balance.

Most of the men were either single or not involved with the child care of their own children. Despite legal sanctions, managers would quite frequently ask the women about their childbearing plans before assigning them to projects. One particularly heated discussion was quite revealing about other unconscious factors that may be responsible for the lack of reasonable solutions regarding the work/family challenge. During a project management discussion, a woman was reminding her all male team members of her decision to work four days a week during the completion of her second pregnancy and for the year following her maternity leave. The project they had been assigned was ideally suited for this flexibility and the woman had had a fifteen year track record of being a solid and dependable worker. When she expressed the fact that her husband still was not satisfied with the arrangement and that he had never been very supportive of her decision to continue to work after they had children, it was as if the floodgates of rage and envy were flung open. The male consensus was that her husband was right and that she should give up her job and stay home with their children.

The concept of male womb envy became very real to me as I watched this group of angry males attack this woman who was in a full and robust eighth month of pregnancy. Modern theorists (Fast, 1978, Bettleheim, 1954, Greenson, 1968) offer that Little Hans was not alone in his wish to have babies like his mother. Both boys and girls are believed to desire the capabilities belonging to both sexes. Eventually, boys must disidentify with mother and give up the fantasy that they can bear children. "This is done partly by the hypercathexis of one's own genital and gender, as well as, by the devaluation of the other sex" (Chezrahi, 1987, p.34). This assists in resolution of the Oedipal complex as well. Perhaps the exaggerated pull away from mother is too great or too early or too late, perhaps father is too fearful and demanding of total separation and devaluation, perhaps the disentangling with her is too abrupt and too complete to leave him without any sense of receptivity and fullness of his own.

The culture further requires him to deny all vulnerability and dependency. When organizations arouse feelings of fear and vulnerability through corporate downsizing and reorganization, men often will projectively identify these feelings onto women who must remain the holders of these unsavory, unmanly emotions. The differences between men and women become overemphasized, as they were originally, in order to differentiate from mother. Separation and independence are the goals and the women and the dependency they represent, the other not-me, must be kept a good distance away. But this is an impossble separation. Boys grow up thinking that they can never really belong to the world of men because these secret spilt-off parts of themselves can't exist in the world of men. They repress their feminine side and feel insecure about what they are hiding. (That is what the great American homophobia is about.) But the pregnant woman is a threat to this split because she is a reminder of a secret wish to be dependent and passive and protected by mother as they were as boys. At the same time, it evokes the memory/fear of being powerless and controlled by a woman. Removing the mother from the workplace is an attempt to hide the longing and disguise the fear.

This dynamic is also evident in the attempt to keep women from powerful roles when they are promoted. Bernardez (1982) notes that men keep women from having power because of "an unconscious fear of female power and dominance" and because of cultural prohibitions on males of experiences that denote submission, passivity, and dependence" (p.44). Men devalue female abilities, and the women, fearing male anger and their own unconscious reactions to it (rage and unconscious guilt), often collude in denying their own competence. Bernardez argues that males in work groups fear the resurrection of not just "the mother of childhood... but the idealized and feared image of her" (p.44). She purports that males form a counter-identification response to the maternal object which causes the splitting and projecting of all things associated with mother. "The male thus controls in the female aspects of himself that he fears and devalues. The domination of women is encouraged by the culture, but its strength comes from the need of males to control and dominate the female-self in themselves. This defense is threatened when a woman in power appears to have control" (p.46).

The unconscious fear of women becoming powerful may explain some of the aggressive and violent behavior observed in many of these companies. Hannah Arendt (1970) wrote that "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy" (p.56). The violent language, posturing, stamping, etc. was quite evident. There were several significant displays especially when they were confronted with issues by women. At times, the behavior had the quality of an ape beating his chest, protecting his territory and announcing his supremacy; it appeared threatening with the possibility of loss of control.

Identification With The Aggressor

Women exposed to this level of aggression in the workplace will resort to a variety of defensive maneuvers to ward off the perceived threat. Women recount efforts to appear neutral and invisible, paring down clothing, make-up, jewelry, keeping desks devoid of pictures and personal paraphernalia. Others describe extreme postures of "wearing a mask," "acting like a robot". Perhaps the most predominant defense women employ consciously and unconsciously is to behave like men in order to blend in, be accepted, feel protected. On a conscious level, many women were aware of not carrying a purse, cursing, drinking, smoking, and the current vogue, smoking cigars, playing golf, talking sports, telling lewd jokes and stories, and in one case accompanying male co-workers to a strip club. More unconscious behaviors involved criticizing and devaluing other women, and acting callously without regard for others in order to appear tough.

Certainly there are women who are drawn to male-dominated fields because they are pulled by counter-phobic response formations against being fearful and anxious about being female. Succeeding in these domains holds the promise of resolution. They aspire to identification with males in strong and obvious ways. Other women may have intellectual interests and strivings in these areas and may have escaped gender devaluation in their families. They approach male-centered industries with more confidence and less fear and have much less of a need to pass as male. However, in regressive environments, the stimulus will be there for women to idealize and/or identify with men in order to ward off the threat of violence and their own unconscious guilt at the rage of inequality.

There is another aspect to this issue that is more culturally pervasive and more indicative of America at large. American women often try to appear as tough and aggressive as their male counterparts. The amount of violence in America against women is well-documented. That is a conscious threat.

The subtle threats and fears that American women unconsciously live with everyday are largely unrecognized. European women often question me about what they perceive as the paranoia and aggressiveness of American women. European men ask about their castrating natures. I don't think it is possible to understand these qualities of American women without understanding the dynamics between the sexes in America that are cultural, historical, social, and very personal. The physical fearfulness of American women is a fact and a factor in gender work conflict.

Women In Relation To Others

"The underlying dynamic of work problems, while not reducible to a single factor, is closely linked to the paramount importance in women of establishing affiliative ties and fear of their loss.... As it emerges in analysis, the major underlying dynamic in women is not penis envy, but fear of loss of love."

(Person, 1982 p.80)

Women's desire for connectedness has been viewed as a central organizing theme in the formation of the female self concept according to modern theorists. The importance of relational ties to women, therefore, will have a significant impact on their behavior in the workplace. In truth, women are puzzled about how to have relationships in business. To paraphrase Gilligan, their "desire for interconnectedness is a personal - not a workplace - connectedness." Connection means friendship and relationships mean friendships. But businesses are built on networking and more surface, opportunistic, and pragmatic relationships. Gilligan states that women are "not adept in relating for other reasons than to be loved." What is therefore a strength at home is an Achilles heel in the office. Women often view the workplace as simply the place where they work. For men it functions as the place where they play the game, fight the war, and develop connections with other men that are permissible and nonthreatening, where both aggression and closeness are limited.

Superego and Unconscious Guilt

The female superego is far from underdeveloped as classical theory proclaimed. It develops in relation to others so it carries the weight of heavy responsibility to and for others. The demands of the superego are intensified in work-family conflicts. The reality, as Person ( 1982) writes, is "That decade from 25-35 years of age is critical both for child-rearing and laying the groundwork for successful professional strategies" (p.71). For many women, the conflict between work and family responsibilities widens the gap between self-image and ego ideal. They become angry with themselves because they cannot be all things to all people in a culture that cultivates notions of superwomen and supermoms. Their aspirations are high, often too high, and that increases the potential for failure and disappointment.

In these male-dominated organizations, the roles the women had, for the most part, threatened their ego ideals. They were not being promoted as often or as high as the men and when they were, they were paid less and placed in less critical roles. The sense that they were failing was overwhelming for many of them, at the same time that they felt they were failing their families by being in these roles. Furthermore, the consensus of male management was that the women were not competent enough or aggressive enough, and the unconscious meaning was, in essence, that they were not like them enough.

The anger the women felt at the dominant males and their control resulted in tremendous amounts of unconscious guilt. This was rarely displayed directly but took the form of reaction formations of idealization of the men, victimization of themselves, and identifications with the men. The guilt was most apparent in the differences between the men and women and the performance appraisals they wrote in the 360 degree appraisal process. Levinson (1995) has argued that unconscious guilt will jeopardize the honesty of evaluations, that the "sense of one destroying the other" will influence the evaluations. The males seemed to actually relish the opportunity to be sadistic in their reports in the more regressive departments, wherein the women were so overwhelmed by the guilt activated by the possibility of revenge and castration, that they could barely even write a negative remark. As one woman stated: "I read what I'd written and I realized if I got this evaluation I'd die, so I rewrote it." The dynamics of polarization increase the perception of the differences between the sexes and in this case confirms male management's opinion that the women aren't tough enough to be leaders.
Separation from Mother and Work Patterns

"Chodorow (1978) argues that the girl has a more difficult time separating from mother because the mother regards her daughter as a narcissistic extension of herself. In her scheme, a girl ultimately turns to her father, and subsequently other men, in order to escape mother.... Female fears of loss of love do relate to fear of abandonment by the mother" (Person, 1982, p.81). Applegarth (1986) postulates two camps of women - those who were more positively identified with mother and her role and responded to mother's desire not to separate by foregoing a need for achievement and essentially staying home with mother , and those who experienced more conflict with their mothers, who were viewed as strong and powerful, and cultivated strong desires to achieve (p.221). However, falling into the latter camp does not provide immunity in the workplace from the conflicts caused by an ambivalent relationship with mother. Professional success is both denied and feared because of its implications for Oedipal victory. Regarding such women, Applegarth (1986) writes, "They may see mother as weak and ineffectual - 'only a woman'; and the work or actual fulfillment of the work to best the mother and to share the work with the father is a thinly disguised Oedipal gratification that may provoke much guilt and fear. The conflicts in the girl may be intensified greatly when the mother is, in actuality, jealous of the daughter's freedom to pursue ends that the mother chose or felt obligated to renounce" (p.220).

In the workplace, women may feel tremendous amounts of unconscious guilt for having left mother to be there, for devaluing mother, for being selfish and taking care of their own needs, and for fantasies of publicly playing with father, having a penis, and essentially getting away with and being rewarded for breaking taboos. The guilt gets played out in many ways by women through depression and low self-esteem due to the disparity between self-image and ego ideal, through physical ailments, and in un-productive, self-defeating, masochistic work habits and styles. These habits and styles are clearly observable in many women and can be grouped into the following areas, although they overlap and reinforce each other: Attributions for Success/Failure, Perfectionism, Fear of Success, Deviance, Failure, Task-driven Behavior.

Attributions for Success/Failure

Attribution research (Deaux, 1976) has traditionally found that women underestimate or have lower expectations of success and men tend to overestimate or have higher expectations of success. Since success is consistent with their expectations for themselves, men attribute their success to stable inner qualities they possess, like superior talent or ability. Since failure is at odds with their expectations and they don't expect it, when they do fail they find it surprising so they attribute it to something temporary, a fluke.

It is the opposite for women. Since they don't expect success, when they do succeed they attribute it to the fluke, to something temporary like luck or how hard they tried rather than to something internal and stable like ability, intellect or talent. When they fail, they more or less expect to, so that does get attributed to something stable, "I'm not bright enough; I haven't the math ability, etc." The classic attribution study of asking men and women to perform a "male task," solving anagrams, illustrated the theory exactly. Men attributed their success to ability, and dismissed their failures to something temporary, like luck or something external to them, like task difficulty. Women did not expect success at the "male task" and when they failed they believed it was because they lacked the requisite ability and when they succeeded they believed it was because they were lucky. Analogously, when women work at male tasks - which is how the culture still views the worlds of finance and technology, and many of the women have unconsciously internalized this - they may view their failures as due to lack of ability and when they succeed it would be too illogical to attribute it to luck (although it's amazing how many do say that) so they usually believe their success comes first and foremost from their hard work, an internal but temporary quality.

As mentioned earlier, women in these fields (supported by the Deloitte and Touche study) confirm that men view them as technically inferior. There is also some research evidence that male superiors do attribute female success less to their abilities than they attribute male success, and this has a direct influence on the supervisor's perceptions of the women's promotability (Igbaria &Baroudi, 1995). Even if the women do believe that they have such abilities, these perceptions and influences can erode their self-confidence, especially when other factors, such as unresolved internal conflicts that may provoke some self-sabotage, collude with external factors such as resentment and envy by men who may unconsciously create situations wherein the women are set-up to fail. These kinds of convergences were visible in a variety of situations.

This issue of "lacking ability," as discussed earlier, sets the penis envy reaction into formation. Applegarth (1986)writes, "men have an extra 'something' necessary for success that they lack. This is something typically located in the brain, based on a conviction that men have more confidence or more mechanical or mathematical aptitude" (p.217). This can frustrate women in these settings, in particular, so much so that they try to find other ways to be successful. They may believe, Applegarth notes, "the only way they can compete with men is to steal something from them or gain revenge by humiliating them (Abraham, 1922). There is some degree of reality in this idea. Men do have a tendency to fear strong and aggressive women inasmuch as they too have fantasies of being envied for their superior penis, with its magical strengths" (p.218). Ultimately, however, not owning and internalizing their success is one way women can act out the onerous guilt that they feel for being more successful and talented than the mother they have left behind. Attributing success to other causes is a type of compromise wherein women can believe essentially that they haven't really cheated on mother. Success for women, in many cases, only feels legitimate when she's done nothing to cause it, nothing that will expose her efforts to pull away from mother and this is quite consistent with the predominant female role models through the ages - fairy tale princesses who were chosen and film stars who were discovered (Person,1982, p.71).

Perfectionism

Perfectionism as a personality style is not the exclusive domain of women. Although it has been studied for its contributions to achievement, it has more often been researched for its connections to forms of pathology. Hewitt and Flett (1991) who have devised a widely used research methodology to operationalize perfectionism wrote, "These adjustment difficulties are believed to arise from the perfectionist's tendency to engage in the following; setting unrealistic standards and striving to attain these standards, selective attention to and overgeneralization of failure, stringent self-evaluations, and a tendency to engage in all-or-none thinking whereby only total success or failure exists as outcomes" (p.456). Hewitt and Flett identify three dimensions of perfectionism, one which is self-oriented and engenders "self-criticism and self-punishment," other-oriented which causes "other-directed blame, lack of trust, and feelings of hostility toward others," and socially prescribed perfectionism which "involves the perceived need to attain standards and expectations prescribed by significant others" and cause a "fear of negative evaluation and place [s] greater importance on obtaining the attention but avoiding the disapproval of others" (p.457).

It is my observation that women in business rely on this style to a great extent as an attempt to mediate a variety of internal conflicts. Research on perfectionism implicates a strong connection between the perfectionism of mothers and daughters (Frost et al, 1991). Thirty percent of the overall variance in daughters' measured perfectionism was accounted for by mothers' - and not fathers' - measured perfectionism and daughters' ratings of mothers' harshness and mothers' self-reports of their harshness. Stiver (1991) discusses the need of many mothers to continue being mothers as their sole sense of identification in the world. They try to extend their role, particularly with their daughters (since they do not have to battle the disidentification with them as exists with their sons) by a "tendency to project feelings of inadequacy" onto them (p.232). Perfectionistic behavior - demanding unrealistic attention or accomplishments, being hypercritical, harsh, intolerant of failure - is a way that many mothers seek to keep their daughters at home with them, at the same time that they devalue and criticize them. Their ambivalence depicts their wish not to be left alone and their projective identification onto the daughters speaks to their own sense of devaluation and incompetence in the world.

The daughters carry the guilt of leaving their mothers along with their internalized harshness and high standards. It's a perfect formula for retribution and the workplace is only too willing to comply with the setting of unrealistic goals. The difficulties inherent in balancing family and career complete the picture for women to torture themselves mercilessly for everything they are not doing perfectly. Brown and Gilligan (1992) write of the "tyranny of the nice and kind, [the] power of the perfect" (p.88) that is already in evidence in adolescent girls. Having to be all things to all people, they learn that relationships have to be preserved at all costs and doing tasks well and being perfect pleases mother, teacher, and eventually boss. When compliance with the demands from work threatens responsibilities at home, a woman is caught between the tension of Scylla and Charybdis. The fantasies of what she must provide for her own children reach fantastic proportions in a culture of supermoms. Furthermore, she's driven by guilt to be as good a mother as her mother in order to maintain that connection, or she's driven by guilt because she wants to surpass her mother and prove that she is capable of doing that which her mother could not do - be a good mother and also achieve in the world (Applegarth, 1986, p.220). The perfectionistic style will provide her with enough self-punishment to atone for both kinds of guilt.

Fear of Success, Deviance, Failure

Fear of success as described by Horner (1972) concerns the fear women have about their connections to others and their sense of femininity being jeopardized by success. Person (1982) believes, however, that fear of success is due to "specific individual neurotic conflict" (p.75). For example, it may involve Oedipal issues and success may be equated with surpassing (destroying) mother. The fear is that "success will arouse the envy of others [mother] and thus potential retaliatory action" (Kets de Vries, 1992, p.52).

Person differentiates fear of success from fear of deviance which has to do more with women's fear of being different from social norms which will diminish a sense of self as appropriately feminine. Both of these fears are activated in the workplace for women who are hardpressed to find role models who have been successful and kept their femininity and their relationships intact. More often than not, they are aware of others in the field who they describe as castrating, cold, overly aggressive, and absent mothers. Women frequently look at promotions with great ambivalence. One woman put it succinctly: "I'm not sure I want to work that hard and give up that much." When the predominant work style is traditionally masculine, aggressive and competitive, with an emphasis on long hours and face time and a neglect of family and home, women are pulled back into the conflict of leaving what is now the internalized mother, metaphoric of connection and relationships and a feminine self, versus pursuing achievement. This tension between achievement and connection can cause women to avoid success in ways that can be incomprehensible to male and female coworkers alike. For example, men told stories of mentoring a woman, getting her promoted only to have her become pregnant and decide not to return to work or move to follow her husband's change of job to another location. This pattern of "self-defeating behavior, 'snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory'" as Kets de Vries (1992) describes it was exemplified by several women who after having been promoted began making visible mistakes that caused others to question the promotions.

Fear of failure in women can cause them to avoid taking professional risks that are necessary for growth and visibility. Person (1982) explains that women may have low self-esteem due to "identification with a maternal figure viewed as worthless." If this view is echoed in the workplace, she will be hesitant to attempt to master new tasks and fail publicly, further enhancing her sense of shame. For many reasons, including their safety, girls are not socialized to take the risks boys are encouraged to take and this can create a style of doing only those things which do not make them feel "uncomfortable." Person points out that such a style reinforces itself because if women do not attempt new things they will not learn from them and internalize the experience. Fear of failure is another way women cling to the pull of home and hearth.

Task-Driven Behavior

If women believe that they are successful because they work hard, if they feel that they must be perfect and compliant, if they are afraid not to live up to the expectations of others, if they unconsciously strive to feel less guilty, a task-driven behavior style will be very appealing. For reasons discussed earlier, women have difficulty with the concept of relationships in a business setting. Task-driven behavior allows them to exclude office relationships almost entirely. They rely on hard work and when they don't succeed they believe they just didn't work hard enough and have no one to blame but themselves. This style is disastrous in most workplaces. Self-promoting and making accomplishments visible are difficult for many women and yet even more essential for them. The old boys network is filled with opportunities from bar room to boardroom to advertise victories. Women have to create such opportunities for themselves. As one woman said: "I didn't realize at first that I needed to campaign for a promotion. I thought people will just see how hard I work and what a good job I'm doing and reward me."

Self-promotion may be conflictual for women with good reason. Person (1982) acknowledged that "Putting oneself forward, among women, is just as much sexual as assertive, since female competition is traditionally a sexual competition, the point of which is to be noticed by men" (p.77). Given the type of regressive, aggressive behavior observed in most of these male-dominated businesses, women would be doubly reluctant to seek sexual attention from the men. The issues of sexual harassment in the workplace are beyond the scope and interest of this paper. The sexual dynamics between these men and women are viewed largely form the point of view of further possibilites for domination and intimidation by the men and when the women engaged in them it was as a function of idealization, envy, or an attempt to separate from the other women and become special and protected.

Power

Acquiring power is a serious complication to women because it will directly impact their sense of relation to others. Up to this point in time, having power was a state of affairs few women ever experienced outside the home, so it was not something most women thought about consciously. But the concept of power and its implications for the image they have of themselves, is something women need assistance in contemplating if they are ever to assume the positions of authority in business they deserve.

Baker Miller (1991) asserts that when women confront power they must also confront selfishness, destructiveness, and being abandoned. If the threat to the ego ideal is too great, women will choose to be seen as inadequate rather than appear selfish, destructive, or be abandoned. Women in the workplace have been sensitized to the abuse of power and often envision a different type of power that involves empowering others. For women, this may be a compromise formation wherein it will be okay for them to have power as long as it is used for the common good. It may also be a reaction formation against their desire to do to others what was done to them. On the other hand, it may just be a concept of power that is based on a value system that is better than that which is currently in vogue.

Anger

"Why do they shut me out of heaven - Did I sing - too loud?"

Emily Dickinson

Anger poses a special problem for women. Their strong desire for interconnectedness leads them to form bonds and relationships that can be threatened by anger and aggression. In Campbell's (1993) study of men and women and aggression, she found that men viewed anger as an instrumental act - a means of obtaining and exercising power to gain social rewards, "whereas for women it functions as an expressive act - a cathartic discharge of anger." Only when women are subject to the most abusive and depriving conditions do they approximate an instrumental use of anger. Campbell writes, "when the ties that bind women close to others are destroyed, what do they have to fear in aggression? They cannot fear the loss of what they do not have.... Wherever women face lives of brutal exploitation that destroys their faith in the value of trust and intimacy, they will be driven to it" (p.140).

Women at work struggle between passivity and aggression to find a place of assertion. Whereas they are criticized for not being assertive enough, their attempts to speak their minds are clearly undermined. Woman after woman recounts stories of sitting at a meeting making a point that falls on deaf ears, only to be heard when a man utters it ten minutes later. As discussed before, powerful women are feared by men, and women who are angry are very powerful. Their effect can be stunted by calling them bitches, by not hearing them, or by viewing them as hysterical and out of control. Campbell writes, "Men retain the power to set the social agenda. They can decide which items are worthy of consideration. They can deny women's right to have their voices heard by refusing to recognize their grievances as real. We can see this in small issues in the home, as well as in major decisions in the boardroom" (p.142).

As with the issue of power, women need assistance to sort through what being angry means to them and how to find acceptability within themselves to become assertive in order to acquire the things they need. Anger can function to tell us what's wrong in our world, internal and external, and women have been shutting off this source of information for far too long. What women learn as girls about suppressing anger, Campbell writes, "is reinforced in the workplace, where women are effectively silent against the power and authority that continues to be vested in men. The personal distress that this causes women, and their higher rates of both neurosis and depression, are symptoms of the internal turmoil that comes with the daily stifling of one's anger" (p160).

THE SHIFT

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men. They describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."

Simone de Beavoir (1952, p.133)

What is the truth for women? What do they see from their own point of view? The premise of this paper is essentially that women need a comprehensive way of understanding themselves and the experience and value of work for them, independent of the meaning work holds for men, and that psychoanalysis is ideally suited to provide the depth and integration other theories cannot. The greatest challenge facing women is to be able to see without the cloud of androcentric socialization and culture that obscures their sight. Only when a woman's vision is cleared of cultural and self-imposed limitations will she have access to the missing half of the human puzzle - her beliefs, her values, her goals, her style, her way of doing things.

In a profound and metaphoric example, Janice Yoder, as related by Judith Lorber (1993), tells the story of the West Point female cadet who managed to scale the eight foot wall (the same task female firefighters must master) by not using a bolster as most women did for which they would lose points, but by gripping the wall with her two hands and then walking her legs up the side until her feet went over the edge, and she could use her legs to hoist her bottom over the top. The example is dynamic not only because it indicates that women can capitalize on lower body strength as well as men can on upper body strength, but by the paradigmatic shift in thinking this woman experienced that caused her vision to be cleared of all limiting images so that she saw the task as something that existed between her and the wall and relative to no man. Only when women free their intuitive and creative vision can they contribute their full share that speaks to why there were these two - different but equal - in the garden in the first place.

The women that have been described in this paper are, for the most part, women who have lost their way. As Odysseus on the journey homeward and inward became conflicted and distracted and seduced by various forces, so too have they eaten the fruit of the lotus and regressed to a state of victimized passivity, or believed the promise of Calypso and tried to stay girls forever with daddies who are bigger and stronger and continue to take care of everything. Some have been lured by the song of the sirens to self-destruct by giving up their essential feminine core for a masculine identity.

Yet others stand poised at the mouth of the Nekyia - the land of the underworld - ready to take the journey downward but without benefit of advice from Teiresias. Here is where psychoanalysis can come to their aid. A woman in one of the workshops said, "I want help, guidance like I had from women with my maternity, but here in the workplace women don't help each other, don't give advice... maybe they can't." The struggles and conflicts described in this paper that women experience cannot be explored without consideration of the historical, social, and cultural context in which they are embedded, nor without consideration of the individual, personal, and familial structure that intersects with this context. The consideration must include the thorough investigation and interpretation of all that is unconscious within this context and structure - a true voyage to Nekyia - if women are ever to have the self-knowledge necessary for a true paradigm shift.

When Odysseus reaches the island of the Phaeacians, they offer to provide him with a ship that will carry him for the rest of the journey home. This magic ship was guided by an invisible force that required no crew, no sail. The only requirement for Odysseus to receive this ship was to confide to the Phaeacians his true identity. Understanding and claiming their true identity as women - with brain and womb, breast and heart - will grant them the right of passage home.

THE CHALLENGE: FORCED SEPARATION

"We cannot adequately understand men by the study of men alone, nor women solely by the study of women," Daniel Levinson (1996) writes in the preface to his posthumously published book on the passages in women's lives. The feelings and behaviors of the groups of women described herein are incomprehensible without knowledge and understanding of the feelings and behavior of the men they work with who control the departments and organizations where they are all employed. The polarized groups of males and females that are observed in most of these male-dominated industries have been described, but the significance of this polarization must be underscored.

I have come to identify a phenomenon that I have referred to earlier as forced separation which I define as a series of defensive complexes that come into play when men act out of fear of the feminine within and projectively identify all qualities that can be culturally construed as feminine onto women. The women then react to this projection by losing their identities, either by becoming totally stereotypically and usually negatively feminized - passive, dependent, neurotic - or by attempting to become men through identification with the aggressor. Men do it because of psychological and cultural reasons that have become intertwined and potent and women comply because of their responsive psychology in relation to others wherein they don't want to be feared or abandoned by men. Women come to believe that their external ambitions, the masculine side, must be repressed and they must accept a very narrow vision of femininity if they are to be accepted by other women and loved by men. This creates conflict for them in the workplace where these ambitions and abilities are expressed. In situations of forced separation, the differences between men and women are exaggerated and the shared experience of attributes that come to them through different routes of development - for surely men can come to value relation and connectedness and women autonomy and independence - are ignored.

In his book, The Heart Aroused, the poet David Whyte (1994) discusses the impact of corporate life without "poetry," which becomes a metaphor for the voice of the soul. He describes the wish of corporations to control the feminine side through the mythic story of Solomon, a man who kept his wife locked in a cellar. "The neglected imprisoned feminine, kept in the dark, is an ancient archetype. It surfaces in the stories, dreams, and poetic imaginings of all cultures and individuals where the balance has shifted dangerously toward masculine control" (p.198).

Whyte talks of the struggle of corporations to make a "home between the fierce heat of innovation and the cool winds of consolidation" (p.83). In their efforts to re-engineer, to become "lean and mean," it appears to me that many companies overshoot the mark and consolidation becomes a euphemism for getting rid of anything messy, human, feminine. The theory is keep only the money-makers, the bankers, the brokers, the sales and trading people. This has special significance for women. Women are particularly messy. They have to be tolerated at home, but in the boardroom they can be kept at bay. The white male bastion is retrenching and re-engineering in some ways can be seen as a last stand for life as it once was.

The men, however, are having trouble holding up the front, keeping up the pace, and there is insurrection within the ranks. It was not unusual for men to speak privately of their inner anguish at missing their children, feeling unconnected to their wives, and having lost a sense of purpose in their lives. At the same time, they would caution that they would not be willing to own any of these feelings in a group. Nevertheless, as Whyte writes "present-day corporate America is alive with movement yet filled with dark and brooding omens. It feeds our economy, our families, and our communities, yet does as much to break apart those same communities, families, and individuals who work for it as any force we have in our society" (p.227) and many men as well as women would like to see that change.

This paper promised a response to the question, "What does psychoanalytic organizational theory and application have to offer the women of Workforce 2000?" It can offer women an answer to the question asked by Freud many years ago "What do women want?" And the answer is simply the same response Freud gave men regarding their happiness and well-being: "They want to love and to work."

The broader question is what kind of assistance can psychoanalytic theory offer women and men to end the pain of forced separation. That is the challenge of the future. Women have come forward with a cry for help. But upon closer examination, men and women both are in need of assistance. The dynamic conflicts that exist between them under the name of gender speak to a one-sidedness in our world that can go no further.

In the Illiad, Odysseus's masculine side ruled in the glory of his conquest of Troy. But the Odyssey begins with a devastating and surprising defeat for Odysseus and his men by an inconsequential enemy. The style of aggression and bravura of his youth begin to fail him and the Odyssey tells of the journey that awakens in him his feminine side.

Only when he allows this dark, unconscious, intuitive side of himself to surface does he find the way home ultimately to be reunited with Penelope in the true meaning of what Jung meant by coniunctio.

It is time to climb over the garden wall where once there were two existing together. Women will approach with their own vision and their own sound. Men will be able to see this as a way out of the corner, a way to be relieved of a burden they have carried too long. As two best feet come forward, change will begin. This is the real meaning of affirmative action. Each of the world's sexes will contribute that which is uniquely theirs to provide - an ecosystem of peoples - proving for once and for all that creation has logic.

The future of our world rests upon this, making oddly prophetic the words of the French resistance poet Aragon: "La femme est l'avenir de l'homme" - "Woman is the future of man."