  Beauvoir alleges that psychoanalysis holds women to a fixed destiny, a developmental and teleological life process, precisely insofar as it defines subjects with reference to a past beyond their control.  By assigning to women an essence or determinate identity, the psychoanalytic reliance on sexual categories once again renders woman as the other to a subject rather than a subject herself, and thereby denies her existential freedom. In Beauvoir's view, however, if women are not themselves subjects, but that in contrast with which men's subjectivities are constituted, they are still freely responsible for this situation, insofar as women collaborate in this process by seeing themselves through the eyes of men, justifying their existence through their romantic relationships, and attempting to mirror men's being. By casting women's otherness as an effect not only of their social situation (with its power relations), but also of their choices (and hence responsibility), Beauvoir preserves women's freedom, unlike the psychoanalytic discourse that she claims rejects “the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value” (Beauvoir 1989, 45).