Neurosis

Neurosis in The Second Sex refers to distress and psychological symptoms discussed in relation to women’s social circumstances and bodily experiences. The book does not present such distress as proof of a fixed female destiny: it places individual crises within the broader conflict between women’s freedom and a situation that can confine them to dependence and repetition.

Conditions and Context

The book’s existentialist framework distinguishes an individual’s freedom to pursue projects from a condition imposed by others. A woman is described as an autonomous freedom who may nevertheless be compelled to assume the position of the Other; when transcendence is constrained into immanence, that constraint can take the form of frustration and oppression. The analysis therefore asks how circumstances limit women’s freedom rather than treating physiological, psychological, or economic destiny as an adequate explanation.

That approach also shapes the discussion of the body. Menstruation can be experienced as alienating, while the book’s account of pregnancy emphasizes its demands and possible risks. Yet biological data are described as important to women’s situation, not as a fixed fate: the body has lived meaning through consciousness, action, and society, and biology alone cannot explain women’s subordination. The text accordingly connects psychological distress to embodied experience without making bodily difference its complete cause.

Puberty and Sexual Initiation

The book presents adolescence as a change in the girl’s experience of time and possibility. In childhood she can understand herself through present activities, relationships, studies, and games; with puberty, an expected adult role seems to take shape within her body. Her youth becomes a period of waiting, especially for a man whom she may be taught to imagine as a liberator and the route to happiness. This narrowing of anticipated possibilities supplies social context for later crises.

Sexual initiation is described as a rupture rather than a simple continuation of childhood experience. The book argues that erotic beginnings can concentrate the difficulties confronting a young woman and have repercussions across her life. Some crises, it says, are resolved more readily than others; in severe cases, it describes suicide or madness. The account makes these outcomes part of a discussion of social, psychological, and bodily differences, rather than presenting them as inevitable consequences of female biology.

Marriage-Related Crises

Marriage can intensify distress because it combines a desired prospect with substantial sacrifices. A girl may fear leaving her family home and confronting an unfamiliar adult life; the book says that neuroses can arise as marriage approaches, and that this crisis is more widespread and serious among girls than among young men. It presents the prospect of marriage not as a uniformly welcomed fulfilment but as a transition that may collide with a woman’s attachments and reluctance.

The cited case history concerns a young woman from a good family who was engaged and said that she loved her fiancé. She experienced vomiting, took morphine nightly, had fits of temper, refused to wash, ate in bed, and would not leave her room. She later acknowledged that she had felt no pleasure in their sexual relationship and found the memory of her fiancé’s kisses repugnant. Stekel’s account connects her conduct to her conflict with her mother and her unwillingness to leave the parental home; after treatment, she pleaded with her mother to abandon the marriage plan, but her mother insisted. A week before the wedding, the young woman died by suicide. The example gives the transition a concrete outcome while showing how family attachment, the pressure to marry, and resistance to leaving home converge in the book’s explanation.

Other responses described include prolonged illness that prevents a wedding, with some women recovering their balance only after breaking an engagement. Fear may also be connected to earlier erotic experiences or to dread that loss of virginity will be discovered. In other cases, the idea of submitting to an unfamiliar man is represented as unbearable because of intense attachments to parents, a sister, or the family home. Women who marry under pressure or because wifehood and motherhood appear to be the only reasonable course may retain an inner resistance that makes early married life difficult or prevents them from finding a stable balance.

The book also questions the assumption that marriage generally rests on love. It presents marriage as an economic and sexual union shaped by collective and social interests, rather than simply by individual happiness. This institutional context helps explain why the transition can provoke conflict even when a woman appears to accept it: the expected role may not correspond to her own attachments or freely chosen aims.

Distress After Marriage and the Wider Argument

The upheaval may continue after the wedding. Drawing on Marcel Prévost, the book describes a young wife returning from her honeymoon who remembers her mother’s furnished apartment as a protected home, while her new dwelling feels improvised and not yet a nest. The passage links this loss of a familiar refuge with long depression and psychoses. Pierre Janet’s cited case of a young bride unable to remain alone in her apartment further illustrates the distress that can accompany the sudden experience of freedom and isolation.

These cases sit within a wider account of women’s constrained time and labor. The book contrasts projects that open a future with domestic tasks that recur without lasting completion. Its description of a rural woman’s working day—from caring for animals and children to field labor, cooking, and evening mending—shows how material demands can restrict time for health, leisure, and independent activity. Likewise, housework is presented as a daily struggle that must begin again, offering no final conquest. Such conditions do not diagnose an individual, but they clarify the social setting against which distress and restricted possibilities are discussed.

The book’s account of marriage-related neurosis thus resists both a purely biological explanation and the reduction of distress to private weakness. It relates crises to transitions, attachments, social expectations, economic dependence, and the limited opportunities available for women to shape their futures. Its central distinction is that the body matters to lived experience but does not predetermine a woman’s place; the question is how society and personal circumstances shape what freedom can become.