Unpacking Competitiveness Within and Between Women: Discussion of “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?”

Abstract

F. Diane Barth’s paper (this issue) illustrates how a woman’s competitiveness can set her up for significant psychic conflict and interpersonal strife. Achievement strivings are an arena in which “being for oneself” may undermine—in fantasy, but also in reality—one’s ability to “be for the other,” and vice versa. My discussion contextualizes Barth’s thinking in relation to earlier psychoanalytic explorations of the female gender identity and its development. I elaborate on the special challenges involved in the achievement-oriented and competitive urges of women in particular, and I attempt to parse more fully the diverse nature and motivational wellsprings of such strivings. While recognizing the author’s clear helpfulness to the patient, I raise a few questions about her theoretical position and technical approach in the case study she presents. In particular, I address what seems to me to be a dominant-submissive element that to some extent reenacts the competitive dynamic being analyzed.