1. Frederick Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk, De vrouw: haar natuur, verschijningen bestaan: een existentieel-psychologische studie ( Utrecht: Spectrum, 1956 )
2. Since consultation of Buytendijk’s original work was not possible, two other editions of this work were consulted. These were F.J.J. Buytendijk, La Femme: Ses modes d’être, de paraître, d’exister: Essai de psychologie existentielle, texte français d’Alphonse de Waelhens et René Micha, Textes et études anthropologiques, 2e édition ( Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1954 )
3. F.J.J. Buytendijk, Woman: A Contemporary View, trans. Denis J. Barrett (New York: Newman Press and Association Press, 1968 ). All citations and references in this essay come from the latter, English translation.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). All citations and ref-erences in this essay come from The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953 ).
5. In a footnote to his discussion of symmetry, Buytendijk cites psychological studies performed on schizophrenics, neurotics, and depressives in which the patients showed what Binswanger describes as, “a remarkable tendency to complain about the symmetry of the ink-blot patterns. It is life that they are actually complaining about.” (L. Binswanger, Bemerkungen zu zwei wenig beachteten “Gedanken” Pascals über Symmetrie,Zeitschr. f. Kinderpsychiatrie, 1947, 14, Jrg. H. 1/2). After citing these studies, Buytendijk speculates further that “[c]oncerning the asymmetrical attitudes of criticism and doubt, we might well ask to what extent these attitudes themselves reflect a certain alienation from the immediacy of life. These attitudes need not of course go to the extent of being repulsive, but they can reveal, in the human face, how very much human existence is already in principle a transcendence over biological life.” (Buytendijk, Woman,footnote 15, 228–29).