The notions of inferiority complex and masculinity complex remind me of the anecdote that Denis de Rougemont recounts in La part du diable (The Devil’s Share): a woman imagined that birds were attacking her when she went walking in the country; after several months of psychoanalytical treatment that failed to cure her of her obsession, the doctor accompanied her to the clinic garden and realized that the birds were attacking her.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by Constance Bord and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier