Fixing women: devaluation, idealization, and the female fetish

A particular ideal of femininity which has long been popular in our culture is the image of the esthetically perfect but behaviorally compliant woman. By comparing two clinical cases, I have attempted to show that this stylized image is sometimes part of a specific defensive structure, enacted in extreme forms as part of a perverse ritual. The idealized image is a secondary formation with roots in early transitional representations. As an adult defense, it isolates devalued attributes, particularly anal attributes, from an esthetic ideal and enables the narcissistically disturbed individual to effect an illusion of separation while maintaining compulsive control over a needed object. The enactment of this defensive pattern frequently requires the cooperation of a partner. Women comply not only for masochistic reasons or because of intimidation, but because the fetishistic ritual itself is often an important part of their defensive armory. Women who rely on the idealization provided by a partner as the major source of their self-esteem are sometimes willing to accept pathological features of a partnership rather than give up this narcissistic support. At the more creative end of the continuum between pathological and adaptive transitional representations, the idealized image of woman may lend a playful romantic tone to relationships between men and women. In its most compulsive manifestations, however, it tends to perpetuate superficiality and impedes understanding between the sexes. Patients in whom the ideal is elaborated in its most distorted forms offer a useful opportunity to explore the roots of these phenomena.