ABSTRACT
Fiction and folklore are full of tales of young women looking to men to save them from divided love and hate of those assigned to mother them as children. The story of Rapunzel, as many will remember, begins with a sorceress punishing a childless couple for stealing her vegetables by making them promise that, as soon as the wife has a baby, she will give it to her. Young girls being saved by princes and other high-born strangers from good mothers replaced by cruel stepmothers and witches is not only the stuff of fairy tales. Schreiner depicts the young Lyndall being saved by men from her stepmother’s ridiculous and obscene-seeming craving for sex. Horney was one of the first psychoanalysts to take issue in the 1920s with Freud’s notorious penis envy theory of women’s psychology.
