Women's intuition has been a favorite topic for a long time. Woman's intuition stood to her as reason stood to man, and was a proof of her greater emotionality. Shakespeare, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, makes Lucetta say:
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| | I have no other but a woman's reason; I think him so because I think him so .
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And Shakespeare, who was himself among the most sensitively feminine of spirits, was a great understander and admirer of women. Indeed, as Ruskin noted in Sesame and Lilies many years ago, Shakespeare has no heroes; he has heroines only. The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom or virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none.
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Woman's intuition, as everyone knows, is a true faculty that most women possess in a form far more highly developed than anything the random male ever acquires. It is a kind of sixth sense, an ability to listen in the dark, a capacity for picking up, as it were, vibration of every short wavelength almost as soon as they have been generated. James Stephens put it very nicely in The Crock of Gold when he wrote, "Women and birds are able to see without turning their heads, and that is indeed a necessary provision, for they are both surrounded by enemies." Being a woman, as Joseph Conrad remarked, is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men. As Helene Deutsch put it,
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| | Woman's understanding of other people's minds, her intuition, is the result of an unconscious process through which the subjective experience of another person is made one's own by association and thus is immediately understood. The other person's subjective experience manifests itself in an external happening that is sometimes barely perceptible, but that in an intuitive person evokes by quick association a definite inner state; the conscious perception rapidly tames the inner reaction, incorporates the impression received into a harmonious series of ideas, masters the "inspirational" element, and translates it into the sober form of conscious knowledge. Since the whole process is very rapid, its second phase, that is, the intellectual elaboration, is barely perceivedeverything seems to take place in the unconscious and affective element, because the conscious ingredient does not come to the fore.
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