The Angry Woman Syndrome

Following is an excerpt from "the Angry Woman" by Psychiatrist Nathan Rickles (Note: that we are not only blamed for our anger, but we have also become a "syndrome")

Rickles writes: "Specific common denominators in the angry woman syndrome set it apart from any present-day classification. These symptoms are periodic outbursts of unprovoked anger, marital maladjustment, serious suicide attempts, proneness to abuse of alcohol and drugs, a morbidly oriented critical attitude to prople and a contrary obsessive need to excel in all endeavours, with an intense need for neatness and punctuality".

Helen Levine, a famous orator, mentions in one of her talks regarding this excerpt:

This diatribe against women, under the guide of diagnostic classification, is a chilling example of how women themselves are clinically blamed for the anger, desperation, and even excellence that are part of our lives. the political and personal context of our lives in marriage orbeyond is not considered. The catch 22 of women's lives comes clear: submission, dependency and conformity create hazards for us, as do our anger and desperation.

Be they concerned with incest, wife battering, rape or whatever, the helping professionals manage to zero in on female, rather than male, culpability. Under the guise of expert and sophisticated definitions of normalcy developed primarily by men, women have been kept firmly tied to the traditional institutions of marriage and motherhood. One woman, who had been on tranquilizers for 10 years, said. "I use these drugs one purpose, and one purpose onlu, to protect my family from my irritability." How is it that a woman's health is permitted to be sacrificed for others in this way? Why do we train women to drug themselves into a denial of their own needs and aspirations on the altar of family well-being? What happens when women try routes other than drugs or docility?

I want to share examples from the literature that may have particular meaning to those who are in the helping professions. Erik Erikson's work is considered basic to the curriculum of many schools of social work, psychology and psychiatry. Erikson says that young women often ask whether they can " have an identity" before they know whom they will marry and for whom they wil make a home. He thinks that much of a young woman's identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness and in the selectivity of her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought? In Childhood and society, Erikson devoted seventeen pages to the identity development of adolescent boy and one paragraph to the development of the adolescent girl.