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Increasingly, women are rejecting the traditional male-therapist/female-patient dyad for a newer dyad: female-therapist/female patient. Does the woman therapist pose a threat to the existing maledominated therapeutic setting? What hitherto unrecognized set of complex human behaviors and social changes are coming into play to make women – who still constitute the major portion of the patient population, according to NIMH statistics and studies of clients in private therapy – increasingly choose women therapists?
The underlying assumption of this paper is neither that women make better therapists than men nor that the sex of the therapist is the most important factor in predicting the outcome of the therapy. Rather, I feel that there are basic important differences in orientation between male and female therapists which, during this “feminist” era of increasing women's self-awareness and the growing pride of women in being women, strongly affect women patients and potential patients.
Traditionally, psychotherapy for women has been viewed from a male vantage point. Thinking back over the period of my own training as a clinician and psychotherapist, I cannot recall a textbook (or teacher, for that matter) in psychotherapy and counseling which distinguished between males and females in either diagnosis, treatment procedures, or goals. There seems to have been an assumption that male and female patients were interchangeable and that this unitary approach – with the male as model – was sufficient.,
This attitude also reflected the thinking of the major theoreticians and practitioners, who, if they did acknowledge the special needs of women, couched them in words and phrases that served to downgrade and negate them. True, young children were often sent to female therapists on the