* Penelope Russianoff; Psychotherapist, Author

Penelope Russianoff, 82, a psychotherapist and writer who advised women to assert themselves and reject the lessons of helplessness that they learned as children. Born in Baltimore, Russianoff was a gangly girl who at the age of 14 was 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds. She later recalled the pain of being “laughed at on the street” for her appearance. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology and philosophy from the University of Michigan and a PhD in clinical psychology from Northwestern University. Recalling her own youth and young adulthood, Russianoff cautioned women against putting all their emotional eggs into the basket of a relationship with a man. “About 95% of my female patients think that they are nothing without a man,” she told a reporter in the early 1980s. What women need for psychological health, Russianoff said, is “to get unfixated on men . . . to stop pivoting around a man as the core of their security and to learn to pivot around the core of security they build up in themselves.” Russianoff appeared as a therapist in the 1978 film “An Unmarried Woman,” offering advice to a patient, played by Jill Clayburgh, on how to pull her life back together after her husband left her. That brief appearance led to book contracts for Russianoff, who wrote “Why Do I Think I’m Nothing Without a Man?” and, several years later, “When Am I Going to Be Happy?” On Aug. 28 at her home in New York City.