 McLeod’s examples illustrate the ways in which interpersonal conditions affect agents’ abilities for self-trust and hence their autonomy. Benson (1994) develops a similar line of thought. He describes a case of a woman with a certain personality type (Benson 1994, 555–7): she is excitable, imaginative, and passionate, and is “prone to emotional outbursts in public” (Benson 1994, 556). The woman’s husband, whom the woman trusts, is a physician, and his response is to “medicalize” his wife’s personality type as psychologically unstable and “hysterical”. The husband treats his wife as if she were crazy. As Benson describes it, the woman’s response is helplessness and disorientation leading to lost self-worth. The husband’s and the establishment’s attitude to the woman radically affect her self-conception; it becomes destabilized and her self-confidence is eroded. Moreover, the woman does not resist the process through which she loses her self-worth because “she arrives at her sense of incompetence and estrangement…on the basis of reasons that are valued by a scientific establishment which is socially validated and which she trusts” (Benson 1994, 657). Benson argues that although the woman’s critical reasoning faculties are intact, she nevertheless lacks autonomy because of a diminished sense of self-worth.