Be careful what you wish for

Good girls go to Heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.

(Helen Gurley Brown)

The author presents her clinical observations regarding a group of educated women with whom she has worked over the last decade. She observes they present different issues from the passive women with whom she worked in the 1980s. Today, she sees some women as entitled and outright aggressive, lacking the superego controls that would contain their aggression. She introduces the “Cleopatra complex,” describing similarities between these “outrageous” women and the Egyptian queen. Lieberman expresses surprise at how these women uninhibitedly express their intense aggression and narcissistic entitlement.