Psychotherapy with compulsively striving professional women 1: Introducing the patient group

In this paper I develop a profile of compulsively striving professional women with whom I have found myself working in private psychotherapy practice. I put them into a developmental, systemic and cultural context, and suggest a theoretical perspective. In a subsequent article (‘Clinical issues’) I shall describe the challenge they present from a clinical point of view and how these difficulties might be addressed in individual psychotherapy.