ABSTRACT
This chapter asserts that, since the 1980s, a new psychic position for white middle-class women has been offered culturally, a position requiring a denigration of the relational capacities that were the ideal psychic position culturally demanded of white middle-class women in an earlier historical period. The chapter provides a detailed clinical vignette that typifies some of the new conflicts faced by professional white women. These conflicts are engendered by workplace conditions that promote defensive autonomy, a version of autonomy produced by the cultural denigration and psychic repudiation of relational capacities.
