Women seek to recreate a sheltered childhood situation, not their father, in love

Evidence

Psychoanalysts like to claim that the woman seeks her father’s image in her lover; but it is because he is man, not father, that he dazzles the child, and every man shares this magic; the woman wishes not to reincarnate one individual in another but to bring back to life a situation: one she knew as a little girl, sheltered by adults; she was an integral part of her family home life, she felt the peace of quasi-passivity; love will bring her mother as well as her father back to her, and her childhood as well; what she wishes is to find a roof over her head, walls that hide her from her abandonment within the world, laws that protect her from her freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1845

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reframes the Freudian Electra-narrative: the woman’s desire is for the situation of protected quasi-passivity, not for the father-as-person. This is a definition of feminine love contrary to psychoanalytic orthodoxy.
• XREF: Directly engages and overturns the Freudian framework that the book has been systematically criticizing; connects to earlier chapters on psychoanalysis and to the existentialist-situational method.