The strength of the book is that it raises the issue of women's dependency needs and describes so many of the non-constructive forms such dependency may take in women's lives. Dowling has vividly supported her premise with anecdotal examples of women who experience their own dependency as paralysing and debilitating. Its major weakness is that it takes the initial premise as a given and provides almost no alternative models or processes for attaining more constructive forms of living with these needs. The final chapter in the book. titled "Spring Free". is primarily a recounting of Dowling's own experience of recognizing and dealing with the "hidden dependency needs". A few additional vignettes are presented and the overall process of "springing free" is characterized as a sudden transformation -- a magical awakening where all the constraints and conflicts fall away and a new person full of the requisite self-love (and achievement motivation) arises full-blown, never again to face the fear of abandonment within. Sounds a bit like a different version of Cinderella, doesn't it?

Such transformations do, of course, occur in women's lives. And, they occur over and over again as we test new dimensions of ourselves against the world and against the inner obstacles of fear and uncertainty and confusion. They occur for men and women, as persons grow and move through the cycles of life, facing new inner and outer life events and demands. There is good evidence that they continue well into old age for women. But they are not magical -- they are a stage in an identifiable cycle of personal learning which is not unique to women and which has been well documented in women's lives and in men's. When a man experiences such mid-life uncertainty and change of values (which many men do) his sense of helplessness, his looking to family for a sense of security, his choosing to give up a successful business career to be a kindergarten teacher or a potato farmer would be labelled a mid-life transition or a restructuring of the life course. It would not be assumed to be a nearly hopeless struggle against infantile dependency needs which "should" have been overcome much earlier in life.

What Dowling has failed to recognize is that the process of coming to terms with one's dependence needs is a generalized growth process occurring over and over in our lives. This process -- basically one of identity formation and maintenance -- is more likely to occur first in the early twenties in men's lives simply because of socialization. Women's life course development is much more variable than men's; it appears that many women bypass the establishment of their own independent identities temporarily, develop skill in forming intimate relationships first, and then are faced with having to establish their own independent identities in later life periods. While this pattern may help explain some of Dowling's panic-stricken women who are just discovering that they haven't yet worked through their dependency needs, it also provides a basis for suggesting that it need not be normative to expect oneself to have resolved this issue. In fact, it appears that women also experience many more role shifts in adult life and thus must go through the reestablishment of identity several times. Far from being a negative characteristic, this factor may contribute to good mental health in old age and to enhanced ability to cope with stress. The reformulation of our identities is always a painful, but not necessarily a destructive, process.